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Willem de Kooning in Amsterdam: Wanderer between abstraction and figure

Reporting by Berliner ZeitungRead the original at berliner-zeitung.de

Executive Summary

Willem de Kooning, who died in 1997, left behind a body of work that has garnered significant financial success, with major works held in prominent museums such as MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum. The artist resisted being categorized solely as an abstract painter, particularly concerning his depictions of the female form. His career involved periods of intense exploration, including creating "Woman I" (1950–1952) and later large-scale body drawings in the 1970s. During this time, he faced criticism from feminists who labeled him a sexist and drunkard for glorifying machismo while painting women. De Kooning experienced travel, including to Italy, where he found a period of peace, and subsequent retreats to New York, which influenced his artistic focus from abstraction toward intensely erotic figural studies. His painting process was rooted in drawing, serving as a means of exploration rather than stagnation, leading to contradictions between force and tenderness across his oeuvre.

Facts Only

* Willem de Kooning died in 1997 in New York.
* Paintings like "Interchange" sold for $300 million in 2015; main works reside in institutions like MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum.
* De Kooning's work includes "Woman I," painted between 1950 and 1952.
* He was a key figure from the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.
* The artist resisted classifying his work as purely abstract.
* Feminists branded him a "drunkard," "sexist," and "hater of women."
* De Kooning exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1950 and 1954.
* His career began when he moved to New York in 1926.
* He created large-format body drawings from the mid-1970s onward.
* The retrospective is shown at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam until January 17, 2027.

Full Take

The narrative frames De Kooning's artistic trajectory as a resistance against dominant aesthetic dogma—specifically the rigid demands of Abstract Expressionist orthodoxy and later critical dismissal regarding figuration. The tension between his exploration of corporeality (the figure) and abstraction (the gestural lines, color fields) functions as the central structural motif. The shift described from the "wild," energetic expression in the 1950s to the muted, harmonious forms later in life suggests a transition influenced by personal experience—retreat, the impact of disease, and negotiation with societal hostility. This tension is not merely biographical; it mirrors the broader historical conflict between radical artistic innovation and established institutional control. The pattern of external hostility (feminist critique) colliding with internal artistic drive reveals how the valuation of art is inseparable from social and gendered power structures. The subsequent retreat into a more internalized, quieter visual language suggests an agency exercised through self-limitation rather than outright victory over the external forces that shaped his reputation.

From the original · Berliner Zeitung

Willem de Kooning has just returned home to the Rijks, the magnificent National Museum of the Netherlands. Posthumously, of course, as he died in New York in 1997: very old, very sick.

Read the full story at berliner-zeitung.de

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