Willem de Kooning
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IN CONTRAST to his precocious colleagues, Stuart Davis and Peter Blume, Willem de Kooning had progressed slowly toward his vigorous maturity as an artist. He developed the rich, turbulent style by which he is now known as a leader among American painters of his generation. Before that he was occasionally heard of as a skilled draftsman in the realist tradition. One learned that he was in no hurry to exhibit his works, that his struggles of conscience were prolonged, that he was determined to understand fully the nature of his creative impetus as an artist.
All this seemed in character with de Kooning's Dutch heritage (he was born in Rotterdam in 1904 and came to this country in 1926). Yet nothing quite prepared us for the authority of his first one-man show, held in New York at the Egan Gallery in 1948. Here was an artist in whom the emotionalism of van Gogh and Mondrian's restraint were combined but left no stylistic trace of either predecessor. Here was a painter whose color was often sombre, whose strong contours were controlled, but whose pictures nevertheless conveyed a sense of tumult and ardor. One found it hard to think of these paintings as abstractions.
After a while they were not. The whirlpool forms of Excavation began to take on a human configuration, and there evolved the series of pictures collectively entitled Woman. The fierce conviction of these images was almost unique in postwar painting here or abroad. They sticked like burrs to memory, and had a profound effect on younger American artists, eager to move beyond pure abstraction to more specifically human content.
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