Icon of Abstract Expressionism De Kooning Dies

Willem de Kooning, the Abstract Expressionist considered by many the world’s greatest living artist, died Wednesday at 92.

He died in his studio on New York’s Long Island, where he had continued to paint until recent years despite having Alzheimer’s disease.

Although De Kooning suffered, his painting remarkably did not. He seldom recognized old friends, but many critics and connoisseurs of art believed he did some of the best work of his long life as his memory and mind apparently were failing.

By 1989 he had deteriorated to a point where his only child, Lisa de Kooning, won court appointment along with attorney John Eastman as conservators of his person and estate, including a vast number of his paintings, which have fetched as much as $20 million apiece.

That was the year De Kooning’s Alzheimer’s was diagnosed, shortly after the death of his wife, artist and art professor Elaine Fried de Kooning.

Under the direction of his daughter and lawyers, nurses and attendants guided De Kooning daily through the acts of washing, dressing, eating and a session on an exercise bicycle, and then steered him into his East Hampton studio. There, until he finally ceased painting in the early 1990s, he returned to some form of awareness, mixing his own colors and applying them to canvas. When he tired, assistants led him away, and he spent the rest of the day sitting and staring at the floor or out the window.

De Kooning’s 90th birthday in 1994 prompted the National Gallery of Art in Washington to mount a retrospective of his work. The painter’s lifelong output, commented Times art critic Christopher Knight, was “a superlative achievement.”

There was some fear that De Kooning’s work beginning in the late 1980s must be less valuable and that his family was staging a hoax to sell his latest paintings at a huge sum.

But Knight and other critics also embraced a current show dubbed “Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings,” which was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995 and is now winding up at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

“There are pictures in this show,” Knight wrote, “that are as flat-out satisfying as any abstract paintings you could name.”

De Kooning’s mental decline was a marked contrast for the vigorous Dutch immigrant, who went from commercial artist to house painter to pioneering Abstract Expressionist and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Along with Jackson Pollock, who died in 1956, De Kooning was considered the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists because he not only remained true to that post-World War II discipline but continually pushed it in new directions. He was prolific and built a huge body of work over five decades, which became the genre’s prime example of its trademark spontaneity and action painting. He also introduced monumental scale to contemporary art (his largest painting was “Excavation” at 80 by 100 inches).

Incorporating touches from his good friend Arshile Gorky and Pablo Picasso, De Kooning led his fellows in applying paint in a spontaneous and self-expressive way to form an abstract, or nonrepresentational, composition. But De Kooning alone of the Abstract Expressionists made the human figure a central theme of his work.

He did much of his original work in black and white--huge black paintings with large white linear drawings. But he switched to bright colors when his purse permitted buying the colored paints, infusing his work with light as well as strong color.

Kathleen Kearns, writing for the New Republic, likened his paintings to “glimpses from a car window, often elusive. The mouth of a figure may be almost simplistically clear, while cheeks, hair and hands are suggestive streaks of paint.”

De Kooning’s prolific productivity as an octogenarian, had he been capable of remembering his painting from one day to the next, might have surprised him. He had once marveled over how Titian and Michelangelo were able to continue to paint despite advanced age.

“I can’t figure out how those old guys kept at it, kept painting the way they did,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “Titian, he was 90, with arthritis so bad they had to tie on his paintbrushes. But he kept on painting virgins in that luminous light, like he’d just heard about them. Those guys had everything in place, the virgin and God and the technique, but they kept it up like they were still looking for something. It’s very mysterious.”

“Maybe if I stop,” he joked, “they’ll put me in a box.”

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His father, Leendert, was a wine and beer distributor who won custody of young Willem when his parents separated about five years after his birth. His mother, Cornelia Nobel de Kooning, who ran a tough seaman’s bar, snatched the boy back soon after. Many art historians cite her and her abrupt retrieval of Willem as the basis of his devastating and controversial series titled “Woman,” which he painted in the early 1950s.

At the age of 12, with elementary school behind him, De Kooning entered an informal apprenticeship with commercial artists and designers Jan and Jaap Gidding, who also provided his art education. They enrolled him in night courses at the Rotterdam Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten en Wettenschappen, where he studied academic art and crafts.

“I was working daytime and going to the academy at night, and they equipped me very good,” he said in 1983. “I was a good letterer, and I could paint signs. I never expected to be an artist--just to make a living that way.”

His first jobs were in commercial art, including a year in Belgium during which he visited museums and studied. Only one drawing from his student years survives, a still life titled “Dish With Jugs,” which he drew in 1921.

By 1926, De Kooning decided he belonged in America.

“I figured I was better off in the U.S., because you could see they were a lot better at commercial layout,” he said years later. “Also, the girls looked fantastic. And those western movies, and the jazz, and Louis Armstrong--I liked that a lot.”

After several unsuccessful attempts, De Kooning sailed to the United States as a stowaway.

The future American (he earned U.S. citizenship in 1961) settled in Hoboken, N.J., which had a large Dutch community, while he learned English.

The man who was to become America’s legendary Abstract Expressionist began his career in the U.S. as a Hoboken house painter.

“I was working there, you know, as house painter and doing signs,” he said. “Then I saw this ad in the old New York World for someone to do commercial art jobs, so I went over to New York. It paid good money for those days.”

Adept at crafts as well as art, De Kooning worked for many years doing lettering, sign painting and carpentry. He continued his study of art in frequent forays to Manhattan’s museums, and became friendly with several artists.

De Kooning became an artist in his own right in 1935 when he was employed to do murals for the Federal Arts Project. In that year he also did his first easel painting.

His first independent commission was for part of a mural for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940.

“Light in August,” his series of black and white abstractions painted in the late 1940s, was the subject of his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948. (He later exhibited and was sold by the Sidney Janis Gallery.) Ironically, De Kooning chose black and white solely because the neutral paints were less expensive. But the works were considered his best by many experts.

Art historian Irving Sandler said the show established De Kooning “as a major Abstract Expressionist, second only to Pollock in reputation, and soon to be the most influential artist of his generation.”

One of De Kooning’s first portraits was of his art student Elaine Fried, whom he married in 1943.

Like many artists, De Kooning had frequent self-doubts when a painting was not going well. He actually met artist Mark Rothko on a park bench in Manhattan’s Washington Square as both were taking long, troubled night walks.

“Those anxiety attacks scared the hell out of me,” De Kooning said. “I felt my heart skipping beats. Then this doctor friend told me to take a little brandy in the morning.

“It worked good,” he said. “It stopped the attacks, but I became a drunk.”

His alcoholism contributed to the disintegration of his marriage, and he and his wife separated in 1955. But they never divorced, and she remained his close friend and colleague, maintaining her own house near his in East Hampton until her death from cancer in 1989.

After the separation, De Kooning, who was always attractive to women, moved in with commercial artist Joan Ward. She bore his only child, Lisa, when De Kooning was 52. He went on to other liaisons, but both Lisa and her mother remained close to the artist, later maintaining separate homes near his. They were also friendly to Elaine.

De Kooning’s alcoholic blackouts grew worse, interspersed with periods in drying-out wards, until 1978, when Elaine finally persuaded him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Always influential with young artists, De Kooning taught occasionally--at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948, Yale University in 1950-51 and Smith College in 1965. He disavowed representing any particular movement or style, even as he became the icon of Abstract Expressionism.

The first comprehensive retrospective of his work, titled “Willem de Kooning in East Hampton,” was presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1983-84, but the artist was unimpressed.

Museum retrospectives, he once declared, “treat the artist . . . as if you are dead and they own you.”

In his later years, De Kooning attempted some sculpting of bronze figures. He also garnered awards and money as his works were exhibited at museums and galleries around the world.

Among the trophies were Holland’s Order of Orange-Nassau, awarded to him on his 75th birthday, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. In 1982 his “Two Women” was sold by the art auction house Christie’s for $1.2 million, the highest price paid to that date for a work by a living American artist. In 1987, his “Pink Lady” topped that by selling for $3.6 million. In 1989, his “Interchange” was sold by Sotheby’s for $20.7 million, the highest price paid for any contemporary work.

De Kooning became more reclusive in later years, even before Alzheimer’s invaded his mind. But he continued to paint.

“Just because you’re getting older,” he said in 1983 as he neared 80, “doesn’t mean you’re doing it better. But you can’t stop, either, or you’ll be lost.”

* AN APPRECIATION: Simply put, Willem de Kooning made viewers relate to paintings in a whole new way. A14

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An American Legend

William de Kooning, a Dutch emigre to the United States, was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. The painter, who died Wednesday, was an inventor of Abstract Expressionism; his work has influenced generations of artists.