Painting

1940s

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.