Willem De Kooning

📒 Willem de Kooning, regarded by many artists, critics, and collectors as "the most important painter at work in the middle of our century," came to this country from The Netherlands in 1926, and became, in the thirties and forties, the key figure in a new and revolutionary phase of American art, often called Abstract Expressionism. Along with such painters as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, he helped to create a movement that rejected prevaent European aesthetics and pointed toward a wholly new direction. Packing his canvases with shapes, allusions, actions, counter-actions, a proliferation of images, a piling of ambiguity on top of ambiguity, of paint slashed into high-speed actions, de Kooning influenced an entire generation of painters. Today, he is energetically at work in his Long Island studio, continuing his search for new forms and colors, having had, within the last two years, major exhibitions in this country and abroad. This book catalogues de Kooning's most comprehensive exhibition - a look at the artist in mid-career, beginning with his first mature works in the 1930s and concluding with a large picture finished in November 1967. The text, in the form of a chronological commentary, explores the complex and ambiguous character of the man and his work.