An Introduction to Willem de Kooning

The tangle of black lines with spots of color emerging through a surface resembling cracked mud is one of the artist’s most celebrated artworks and is today an icon of our collection.

But visitors may be less familiar with the artist behind this remarkable work—despite his incredibly prolific and exceptionally inventive seven-decade career. That will change with this summer’s Willem de Kooning Drawing, a major retrospective that showcases the importance of drawing in de Kooning’s artistic practice, from his earliest student work to his late calligraphic paintings.

As a complement to the highly anticipated show, we offer a primer on the artist and his expansive drawing practice.

1. From an early age, de Kooning showed an impressive command of drawing techniques.

De Kooning was born to a working class family in Rotterdam in 1904. Recognizing his artistic talent, his parents sent him to apprentice with a decorating firm when he was just 12 years old. It was there that de Kooning learned skills like marbling, faux wood grain, and hand lettering. The owners of the firm also realized his talent and encouraged him to enroll in night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences in 1917.

2. When de Kooning was just a teenager, he spent two days a week for an entire year—a total of about 600 hours—working on the drawing Dish with Jugs.

Made at the Rotterdam academy, Dish with Jugs is the earliest surviving drawing by de Kooning. Later he described it as being “like a photograph, except more romantic.” The rigorous drawing instruction at the academy shaped his artistic foundation.

3. Hoping to become an illustrator in America, de Kooning stowed away in the boiler room of a freight ship bound for the United States in 1926 at the age of 22.

De Kooning was inspired by the illustrations he saw in American magazines in the Netherlands, later remarking, “Those illustrators were way ahead of everyone in Holland, so what I really wanted to be in America was an illustrator.” De Kooning left so abruptly that he didn’t even say goodbye to his family.

4. After settling in New York City in 1927, de Kooning found work as a commercial artist, including as a house and sign painter and window display designer. He also quickly became immersed in the city’s burgeoning art world.

He worked in the mural division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935–37 and on a commission for a mural for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. He was also drawing portraits of his friends and future wife, Elaine Fried, and getting to know fellow artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham. Ultimately, he became a key figure of the movement that would be known as “Abstract Expressionism” or the “New York School” with such contemporaries as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

5. Inspired by his experience with the WPA, de Kooning began prioritizing his own art over his commercial work. Often struggling to make ends meet, he sometimes resorted to using salvaged papers and cheap materials, such as enamel house paint. 

He frequently integrated materials, tools, and tricks he learned as a commercial artist into his fine art practice. These included sign painters’ brushes, translucent paper (known as vellum), and carbon transfer paper.

6. De Kooning was often inspired by cartoons and comics, once remarking, “I have a lot of cartoonist in me.”

Early on he would copy and draw from some of his favorite comics. Later he used and reused simple cartoon-like shapes to signify forms like faces in his artworks, eventually creating an iconography of forms that served as a personal visual inventory. Stripping down a face or body to its essentials—abstraction through cartooning—is a salient feature of de Kooning’s 1940s drawings, as he moved away from the detailed, modeled forms of his more traditional figure drawings.

7. In the late 1940s, de Kooning produced a series of abstract black-and-white paintings. He was already recognized as a serious artist by his peers, but when these works were exhibited in 1948, they established his reputation in the eyes of critics.

In these paintings and a subsequent group of drawings, he used materials and tools that were unusual for fine art: He applied readily available and inexpensive enamel house paint, often used by sign painters, with a liner brush, a tool he was familiar with from the sign painting trade. In the drawings he brushed, poured, dripped, and dragged the enamel across sheets of paper, creating mottled shapes and allover abstract compositions.

8. This exploration of abstraction culminated in the Art Institute’s monumental Excavation of 1950. Despite its lauded status now, the painting was not well received by Chicago critics upon its acquisition by the museum. 

People were used to seeing traditional landscapes and portraits, and the press mocked curator Katherine Kuh for acquiring it, calling her “coo-coo.” The museum’s board was also not pleased with this work entering the collection and asked if it could remain off view. Today it is considered one of the museum’s most important works, and it rarely leaves our galleries.

9. In the early 1950s, de Kooning took his work in a new direction, moving away from his allover, black-and-white abstractions and returning to the figure, especially images of women.

But this wasn’t a traditional return to representation. De Kooning’s figures were wildly distorted, energetic, and still deeply abstract. Many of his contemporaries were shocked by his renewed embrace of figuration as well as his approach to portraying the female form, interpreting his women as grotesque and violent. But de Kooning saw his works as part of the long tradition of depicting female sitters, and he pulled from art historical sources and images from popular culture. As he worked for two and a half years on his monumental painting Woman I, he produced numerous densely layered drawings exploring the theme of woman in some combination of charcoal, pastel, and pencil.

10. De Kooning’s drawing practice was influenced by his travels across the world.

While in Rome for four months during 1959–60, de Kooning worked in the studio of Italian artist Afro Basaldella. There he made large abstract collages in enamel on Italian-made paper. While traveling to San Francisco in 1960 and also on a subsequent trip to Italy in 1969, de Kooning didn’t have a proper working setup, so he used straightforward methods of drawing such as with brush and ink on paper. A year later, he traveled to Japan, where he saw sumi brush painting and calligraphy, which inspired a series of lyrical lithographs once back home. Creating these prints in turn likely led him to make a handful of drawings with the greasy ink used in lithography, known as tusche.

11. After de Kooning found critical and financial success in New York City in the late 1950s, he moved in 1963 to Springs, New York, on the south shore of Long Island, where he designed a new studio and home for himself.

The surrounding coastal landscape—especially the light and the water—became an important source of inspiration. He made dozens of drawings, especially in charcoal, of sunbathers, figures playing in nature, and women lounging in rowboats or on the beach. His drawings became looser and more playful during this period.

12. De Kooning created constraints and challenges for himself as a way of disrupting habits—exercises that would loosen both his mind and his hand.

He drew while watching television, with his nondominant hand, and even with his eyes closed. Speaking about the last method, he explained: “I feel my hand skate over the paper. I have some image in mind, but the results surprise me.”

13. In de Kooning’s remarkable late works of the 1980s, he distilled his compositions to sweeping contours, open space, and fluid lines: essentially drawings in oil paint.

In many ways, these final works are a culmination of a seven-decade career. They feel both radically new and like a return to the fundamentals of drawing that shaped his practice from the very beginning—a true synthesis of drawing and painting.

De Kooning spent his career breaking boundaries—always in between two seemingly opposed forces: drawing and painting, abstraction and the figure, spontaneity and control, and, as an immigrant, his Dutch and American identities. 

—Mel Becker Solomon, associate research curator, and Charlotte Healy, senior research associate, both in Prints and Drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago

Willem de Kooning Drawing opens to members with three days of Member Previews, June 11–13, and to the public on June 14.

Sponsors

Willem de Kooning Drawing is made possible through the lead support of The Willem de Kooning Foundation.

Major support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, The Regenstein Foundation Fund, and the Maureen & Edward Byron Smith, Jr. Exhibition Endowment Fund. 

Additional support is provided by the Lewis and Susan Manilow Fund and the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

Topics

• Exhibitions
• Artists
• Modern Art
• Contemporary Art
• Prints and Drawings