[...] I consider all painting flee. As far as I am concerned, geometric shapes are not necessarily clear. When things are circumspect or physically clear, it is purely an optical phenomenon. It is a form of uncertainity; it is like accounting for something. It is like drawing something that then is bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is the most unclear thing.

A leading figure in the emergence of abstract expressionist paingting in New York,Willem de Kooning arrived in the United States in 1926 as a twenty-two-year-old stowaway from Holland.During the Depression years,he was a dedicated visitor to the museums and galleries of Manhattan,and did a brief stint as a WPA painter,which was curtiled because he was not a citizen.With resolute determination,de Kooning ventured beyond the radical departures of cubism toward the visceral physicality of the abstractions that comprised his first one-person exhibition,in 1948.Five years later,an exhibition of women painted in aggressive,lashing gestures stunned contemporaries not only for the vehemence of the artist's attack but also fro the evident reversal of direction.Yet accross six decades,the alternation and intertwining of abstraction and figuration remained fundamental to de Kooing's work.

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Willem de Kooning

SALLY YARD

Writings

WILLEM DE KOONING

The Renaissance and Order

Drawings

A Desperate View

Interviews

De Kooning on Pollock

JAMES T. VALLIERE

Interview with Willem de Kooning

HAROLD ROSENBERG

Biography

Selected Bibliography