de Kooning (Pulitzer Prize Winner): An American Master-Fast Shipping

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Winner of the Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critics Award Circle Award. An authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.

Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century,a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he becamea key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Ofall the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific,creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.

The first major biographyof de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure inAmerican culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen lettersand documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed,and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished,and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where helearned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowawayfrom Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American,developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who wasboth a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as acentral figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercialwork and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championinghis work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New Yorkschool—just as American art began to dominate the international scene.

Dashinglyhandsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooninghad a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character ofthe period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractionsand intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on theedge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as FranzKline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreatedto the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, hecreated a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.