Willem de Kooning valuation
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.
What a work by Willem de Kooning is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 24 April 1904, Rotterdam
- Died
- 19 March 1997, East Hampton
- Movements
- Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting
More on Wikipedia.
The lithographs, and the MoMA retrospective
De Kooning made few prints, but two groups stand out. On a visit to California in 1960 he drew two large lithographs on the stones at the University of California's print studio in Berkeley, with Nathan Oliveira and George Miyasaki, using a mop and taking less than an hour. In 1970 and 1971, after a trip to Japan, he made a series of black-and-white lithographs with Irwin Hollander and the printer Fred Genis in New York.
The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective in 2011 and 2012, the first to cover his whole career, brought together nearly two hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. For a print, the edition, the printer and the date identify an impression, and the de Kooning Foundation's records are the reference for the work generally.
The Shelley, Woodstock and the black paintings
De Kooning's parents divorced in 1907. He left school in 1916 to be apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and took evening classes at the Rotterdam academy until 1924; the school is now the Willem de Kooning Academie. He crossed the Atlantic on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and landed at Newport News, Virginia, on 15 August 1926, meaning to draw for the pulp magazines. After a spell at the Dutch Seamen's Home in Hoboken he moved to Manhattan in 1927, joined the art colony at Woodstock in 1928, and came to know Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and John Graham.
His paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s are abstract still lifes of geometric and biomorphic shapes, made alongside a series of solitary male figures, many of them left unfinished. The black-and-white abstractions followed from 1946 to 1949 and made up most of his first one-man show, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948. He met the painter Elaine Fried in 1938, taught her in his loft on West 21st Street and married her in 1943, and he became an American citizen in 1962. Clamdigger and Seated Woman on a Bench, both dated 1972 and 1976, are his best-known sculptures.
Best auction results
- Untitled XXV $66.3m
- Oil on canvas, 1977 · New York · November 2016
- Publicly reported
- A record for the artist at auction when sold.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
