Spheres of AbEx - Heather James Fine Art

WILLEM de KOONING (1904-1997) was a Dutch American artist whowas born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era,de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as AbstractExpressionism and was part of a group of artists that came to be knownas the New York School. The hallmark of de Kooning’s style was anemphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity. Background figures wouldoverlap other figures causing them to appear in the foreground, which inturn might be overlapped by dripping lines of paint thus positioning thearea into the background. De Kooning had painted women regularly inthe early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapesof his early abstractions were derived from objects found in the studio.But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of womenexclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I, which wentthrough innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952. Fromthe late 1950s to the early 1960s, de Kooning entered a new phase ofnearly pure abstractions more related to landscape than to the humanfigure. These paintings, such as Bolton Landing (1957) and Door to theRiver (1960) bear broad brushstrokes and calligraphic tendencies similarto works of his contemporary Franz Kline. In 1963, de Kooning movedpermanently to East Hampton, Long Island, and returned to depictingwomen while also referencing the landscape in such paintings as Woman,Sag Harbor and Clam Diggers. He also turned to sculpture in later years,creating a number of works that were later cast in bronze.