This in-depth study of the paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) from the 1940s through the 1970s breaks new ground in its analysis of the artist's working methods and yields new information about previously unreported materials. De Kooning's idiosyncratic working methods have long engendered intense speculation and debate among conservators and art historians, primarily on the basis of visual inspection and anecdotal accounts rather than rigorous technical analysis. This is the first systematic study of de Kooning's creative process to use comprehensive scientific examinations of the artist's pigments, binders, and supports to inform art historical interpretations, thereby presenting a key to the complicated evolution of the artist's work. Written for conservation scientists, conservators, specialists in modern art history, museum curators, and practicing artists, this book offers insights into the way an artist can achieve radical changes in style. The technical discussions will have practical applications for conservators, curators, collections managers, and collectors who care for twentieth-century art.

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 artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all 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 biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and 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 he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from 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 was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene. Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.

This publication offers an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate the development of the artist's work as it unfolded over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s.

An exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection which comprises sixty-three modern paintings, sculptures and works on paper by fifty artists. The Abstract Expressionist paintings that form the heart of this collection were nearly all created in New York City.

In the early 1960s, and established his art within the pastoral tradition of painting, as well as within the social context of America in the 1960s. She views his art of these years as analogous to the approaches to art taken by many of the Old Master painters, who achieved "old-age" styles late in life. A pioneering essay on the technical qualities of de Kooning's work, reporting on results of infrared examination and other conservation analyses, by Zilczer and Susan.

Illustrated throughout with Lieber's candid photographs, this book presents a firsthand portrait of artist Willem de Kooning that sheds light on Abstract Expressionism and debunks many Kooning myths. 95 illustrations, 70 in full color.