Willem de Kooning
Stowed away to America at twenty-two, and painted Woman until people shouted at him.
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904, trained in the applied arts, and entered the United States illegally in 1926 as a stowaway. He worked as a house painter and commercial artist for years and did not have a solo show until he was forty-four. The Woman paintings of 1950 to 1953, ferocious and figurative at a moment when the avant-garde had declared the figure finished, split his audience permanently. He kept painting through abstraction, the pastoral Long Island landscapes, and finally the sparse ribbon paintings of the 1980s, made while he had dementia. He died in 1997.
The late works of the 1980s raise a question no valuation can avoid: the artist's diagnosis, the role of studio assistants, and the resulting scholarly debate all bear on how those paintings trade, and they are handled separately from the earlier work. The de Kooning Foundation holds the archive. Provenance and exhibition history do most of the work at the upper end. There is a body of charcoal and pastel drawings, a small number of bronzes cast in the 1970s, and a modest print output in lithography.
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