Willem de Kooning

Analysis/Dr Ved Prakash Bhardwaj

If Willem de Kooning was not the public face of New York’s avant-garde like Jackson Pollock, he could certainly be called an artist’s artist—someone whom many of his fellow artists regarded as a leader. He was born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where he grew up in a poor family and received training in fine and commercial arts at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1926 he set out in search of a future in art and planned to travel to Argentina, but he did not have enough money to buy a ticket. He hid aboard a ship. When the ship docked in Virginia, de Kooning got off and, avoiding immigration officials, made his way to New Jersey, where his new life began.

In New Jersey, de Kooning found work as a house painter. Large brushes and
Fluid paint was the tool of this trade, and he continued to use it throughout his artistic career. His skill in drawing and craftsmanship helped him succeed in this job, and the same abilities later helped him succeed as a painter.

De Kooning’s next destination was New York City, where he truly began his life as an artist. When he arrived in New York, the Jazz Age was in full swing. Jazz championed freedom in both melody and voice, breaking away from the polite and disciplined constraints of classical music. Under its influence, artists of that time advanced abstract painting. Abstraction also influenced De Kooning. In New York he came into contact with the works of artists such as Henri Matisse, John D. Graham, and Arshile Gorky, with whom he formed particularly deep and inspiring friendships.

In 1929, the Great Depression brought the Jazz Age to an abrupt end. President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned de Kooning to design public murals as part of his Works Progress Administration programme in the 1930s. He worked under Fernand Léger, which proved to be an important phase in his artistic life. Despite never finishing his formal studies for mural work, de Kooning's abstract works clearly reflect the influence of murals. His experiences while working on murals encouraged him to become a full-time artist.

By the 1940s, de Kooning had become well known as an artist. During his artistic career of nearly seven decades, he worked in many different styles. His work consistently reflected the freedom inherent in jazz music. Being free from rules, possessing an independent consciousness, and expressing himself in his own way became his greatest strengths. In his compositions, one often finds awkward structures, sometimes contradictory or inconsistent, yet these very qualities propelled his art forward. He was influenced by the contemporary life and art around him and also drew inspiration from earlier artists. By combining these influences, he developed his own distinctive style in which traces of many styles could be felt. No single artistic category could easily confine his unique style.

Throughout his career he constantly transformed his work, as if breaking himself apart and reshaping himself anew every few years. From figurative painting to abstraction, he experimented with many approaches, particularly with the combination of human forms and abstraction.

He once said that he was never interested in learning how to make a quality painting; rather, he was interested in seeing how far a work could go. He rejected perfection and any kind of ideal. When beginning a painting, his focus was not on how to make a perfect work but on how far it could be taken. That is why many of his works appear unfinished, because he did not think in terms of completing a painting—he simply pushed it as far as he could and then left it.

Among Abstract Expressionist artists, de Kooning is considered one of the most renowned painters. His works are marked by intense dynamism and emotional tension and reversal. Through cubist fragmentation and distortion of forms, he created emotional shifts, while his brushstrokes imparted movement to the paintings. Whether his works were completely abstract or semi-abstract with human forms, the application of colour—with thick, dark lines—always carried great intensity and depth. Rarely does one feel that the colour in his paintings remains static. Instead, one colour merges into another, giving a sense of forward movement and keeping his works constantly alive.

It is believed that he developed the most distinctive abstract style among his contemporaries, blending Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Yet in every painting, his personal touch and identity remain unmistakable. While many of his contemporaries moved from figurative art toward abstraction, de Kooning consistently combined human forms—especially the female body—with abstraction to develop a new style. He often said that his true subject was the relationship between human existence, time, space, and background. To explore and reveal this relationship, he continued experimenting throughout his life.

In many of his works he combined the human body with abstract landscape-like compositions, which helped him discover new subjects. For this reason he was considered one of the most energetic artists among his contemporaries. He always remained connected with his time and never hesitated to break himself apart and reshape his work according to changing circumstances. After the influence of jazz music, he also engaged with popular culture and Neo-Dada tendencies. His work consequently inspired many young artists of his time. Artists such as Cecily Brown experimented with the erotic gestures expressed in his later paintings and carried forward the tradition established by de Kooning.

De Kooning himself had done something similar. Inspired by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso, he fragmented human figures in his paintings and recomposed them in new ways. This brought forth the fragmented and disturbed image of the contemporary human being. The world wars and the political conditions that followed were likely major reasons behind this. The expressions of the human figures in his works reflect the uncertainty, despair, pain, and anxiety of that time. The constant awareness of an existential crisis that people experienced then can be seen in his works, where figures sometimes appear to dissolve into the ground. This may also explain the sense of incompleteness often perceived in his paintings.

De Kooning frequently spoke of a dynamic incompleteness in his work because the human body in his paintings often appears to move, break apart, and reassemble. He would sometimes continue making changes to his works again and again. His paintings functioned like a laboratory in which the work was never truly finished. For this reason his art is often placed within the framework of Action Painting, a term defined by the critic Harold Rosenberg. His paintings are spaces where something is constantly happening, and in this ongoing process the image transforms into an intensely dynamic experience.

All Images from Google.