Willem de Kooning Biography

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-born American painter who is touted as a pioneer of the 'Abstract Expressionism' movement, more commonly known as the “action painting” genre. His painting style was an amalgamation of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. He was known to paint mostly figures, especially women, and abstractions. He believed his real subjects were always space and the figure-ground perception. He was also a renowned sculptor and he created the ‘Clamdigger’ and ‘Seated Woman on a Bench.’ Most of his peers in New York called him an “artist’s artist”. He became a household name in the world of art and painting after he had his first one-man exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery. Apart from painting, he also briefly taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at the Yale School of Art. In the later stage of his artistic career, he moved to landscape painting and created abstract urban landscapes, abstract parkway landscapes, and abstract pastoral landscapes. Kooning is considered one of the finest artists of the 20th century and his influence on painters, especially those who enjoy gestural styles, remains significant even to this day.