1. Willem de Kooning

2. Willem De Kooning ( )
Born in Netherlands
In 1916 he was apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and decorators, and, about the same time, he enrolled in night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, where he studied for eight years.
In 1920, he went to work for the art director of a large department store.
Jumped ship from a Dutch Freighter docked in Virginia in 1926.
Came under the influence of Gorky in ’27 and became one of his closest friends.

3. De Kooning: Fire Island (1946), Oil on paper, 48 x 67 cm

4. De Kooning: Excavation (1950) Oil on canvas, 200x250cm

5. De Kooning: Excavation (1950)
Thigh-like bulges and elbow-like crooks of the close packed motifs make fleshy forms that suggest bodies.
Drawing-based work executed with much freedom.
Neither Picasso nor Braque would have permitted themselves such forehand and backhand swinging of a loaded brush.
A Free but associative composition.
Key compositional words: Puzzle, jigsaw, fragments.
Influences:
Gorky, Cubism, Picasso, Miro, Bio-Morphism, Auto-matism.

6. Willem de Kooning: Woman I (1950-52) Oil on canvas
De Kooning: Process
De Kooing took an unusually long time to produce this work, working on many studies.
Draws upon an amalgam of female archetypes, from Paleolithic fertility goddesses to contemporary pin–up girls.
Reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine?
Question:
Does the woman partake of the brushwork's energy to confront us aggressively? Or is she herself under attack, nearly obliterated by the welter of violent marks?
Willem de Kooning: Woman I ( ) Oil on canvas

7. Willem de Kooning: Woman I (1952) -Study Piece

8. Willem de Kooning: Seated Woman (1952).
Pencil, pastel, and oil on two sheets of paper, 30 x 24 cm.

9. Willem de Kooning: Woman IV (1952)

10. Willem de Kooning: Woman and Bicycle (1952)

11. After 1950 he began to explore the subject of women exclusively.
Figurative paintings differentiate De Kooning from other A.E’s.
Savagely applied colour is applied as if it has been vomited onto the canvas.
This reveals a woman marked by modern man’s sexual fears.
Female features are exaggerated, toothy snarls, vacuous eyes… extremities that image the darkest Freudian insights.

12. Deliberately vulgar paintings.
The character of form is similar to his more abstract paintings that proceeded them.
“I think it had to do with the idea of the idol, the oracle and the vociferous and all the hilariousness of it.”
The ferocity of the treatment of form is the final word on European Expressionism.
Rubbishes the idea of beauty that has characterised much of Western Art to this date.
Fits in with the primitivising trend of early Abstct. Exrpssnm. (Pollock’s She-wolves and Guardian figures).

13. Squat, inelegant and unapproachable, De Kooning’s women seem like dismantled/ broken versions of Kirchner’s streetwalkers.
In the tradition that Kirchner developed they are the last convincing appearance of the woman as Giftmadchen (medieval poison girl).

14. De Kooning said about Woman I:
“It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light, because that [motif] was the one thing I wanted to get hold of. I thought I might as well stick to the idea that it's got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck."

15. Willem De Kooning: Composition (1955)

16. De Kooning, Composition (1955)
A painting that has been painted over several times, this suggests that he methodically worked and reworked his ideas until he reached a composition that he was satisfied with. This is quiet different to the work of Pollock and other Ab-Ex artists.
Large brushstrokes simply exist side by side.
Ideas of movement are defined in terms of speed, direction, sprays and sudden halts. Similar to early Pollock works.
A sense of growth in De Kooning’s work, a maturity of sorts as he no longer concerns himself with a ‘subject’.
Ideas of process are prominently implied in the work.