Willem de KooningAmerican, 1904–1997Untitled
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Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
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- The museum
About the work
Born in Rotterdam, Willem de Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway on a freighter in 1926. He quickly made his way to New York, where he met Arshile Gorky, one of his closest friends. The artist’s first one-man show, held in a gallery in New York in 1948, featured black-and-white enamel compositions, to which the present example is related. By the 1950s, de Kooning was an acknowledged leader of Abstract Expressionism in America.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Particulars
- Accession number
- 1986.138
In the catalog
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Image: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder
Meanwhile, in the life of Willem de Kooning
The whole life1940s
Meets Franz Kline
De Kooning met the younger painter Franz Kline, who was also working in the figurative style of American realism and had been drawn to monochrome. Kline, who died young, became one of De Kooning’s closest artist friends; his influence is evident in De Kooning’s calligraphic black images of this period.
1943–1957
An “open” marriage with Elaine
Willem and Elaine’s marriage was later called an open marriage: both were casual about sex and about each other’s affairs. Elaine had affairs with men who helped further Willem’s career, such as the art critic Harold Rosenberg, the ARTnews editor Thomas B. Hess and Charles Egan, owner of the Charles Egan Gallery.
1948
First solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery
In 1948 De Kooning had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City, consisting largely of black-and-white works, though a few pieces had passages of bright colour. By then he had already acquired a formidable underground reputation.
1948–1966
Fourteen solo exhibitions
From 1948 to 1966 De Kooning had 14 solo exhibitions, many in New York but also nationally and internationally, among them the Egan Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Allan Stone Gallery and museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Smith College Museum of Art. There were two a year in 1953, 1964 and 1965.
1950s
The path of “figurative abstractions”
In the 1950s De Kooning followed a path of primitivisation and developed so-called “figurative abstractions”: a solitary female figure, under furious, pasty “blow-like” brushstrokes, turns into a painterly totem open to radical Freudian readings.
1951 · Award
Logan Medal of the Arts
