Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was one of the most relentlessly experimental artists of the 20th century—constantly challenging the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, drawing and painting, and spontaneity and revision.

Born to a working-class family in Rotterdam, he immigrated to America at the age of 22 by stowing away on a steamship. He spent the following two decades working as a commercial artist in New York City—sign-painting, designing murals, and illustrating magazines—before finally breaking through as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s.

In 1948, de Kooning had his first solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery, to critical acclaim. The show featured a series of black-and-white abstractions made with household enamel paint and paper. Shortly thereafter, de Kooning began work on Excavation, a large abstract painting embedded with flashes of bodies and landscape. In 1951, Excavation was awarded the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize by the Art Institute of Chicago, marking one of the artist’s first major sales.

In 1953, de Kooning debuted his “Women” series, featuring monumental female figures rendered in a gestural, aggressive style. At the time, the art world was as shocked by de Kooning’s defiant return to the figure as they were by his treatment of the female form, which many interpreted as grotesque and violent. De Kooning, however, viewed his series as a humorous spin on the way women had been portrayed throughout art history, summarized in his words as “the idol, the Venus, the nude.”

In 1963, de Kooning moved to the coastal town of Springs, New York, where he lived and worked the remainder of his life. Inspired by this new landscape, which reminded him of his native Holland, de Kooning’s work became looser and more playful. He experimented with new colors, motifs, and processes, such as drawing and sculpting with his eyes closed. His final paintings from the 1980s are spare and lyrical—the final culmination of his synthesis of abstraction, figuration, drawing, and painting.

In 2026, the Art Institute mounted the exhibition Willem de Kooning Drawing, a major retrospective focused on the artist’s expansive drawing practice and the ways in which it redefined the possibilities of modern and contemporary art.