Willem de Kooning was born in 1904 in Rotterdam, trained at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, and stowed away to the United States in 1926, eventually settling in New York, where he became one of the central figures of Abstract Expressionism. While Pollock poured and Rothko floated, de Kooning attacked the canvas with a slashing, aggressive brushwork that was at once violent and exquisitely controlled, moving restlessly between abstraction and figuration throughout his career.
His Woman series (1950–1953), particularly Woman I, provoked controversy within the Abstract Expressionist circle: at a time when abstraction was held to be painting’s inevitable destiny, de Kooning defiantly reintroduced the figure — but a figure dismembered and reassembled with savage energy, grinning with a combination of eroticism and menace. Excavation (1950), by contrast, is a densely layered, all-over abstraction of interlocking biomorphic forms that ranks among the greatest achievements of the New York School.
De Kooning’s later work — increasingly luminous and fluid paintings of abstracted landscapes inspired by Long Island — showed that his virtuosity was undiminished even as he aged. He continued painting into the late 1980s, by which time Alzheimer’s disease was claiming his memory, and the serene, pared-down works of this final period have been both celebrated for their beauty and debated regarding their authorship. He died in 1997 at ninety-two, the last survivor of the great generation of Abstract Expressionists.