Ramblr

2012/01/27
6 notes

Willem de Kooning, by Dmitri Kasterine, discovered thanks to Kathryn Schulz

Tags: willem de kooning de kooning photography dmitri kasterine

2011/10/18
16 notes

Willem de Kooning in his studio from a 1982 issue of Architectural Digest. via.

Tags: Willem de Kooning de kooning art studio architecture anthology mag

2011/03/23

fav. forever.

Tags: Willem de Kooning women painting abstract expressionism

2010/09/01
2 notes

nickkahler:

Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan, “Willem de Kooning (1904-97): An American Master” Photograph, 1960 (text via artcritical)

‘The Second World War brought the School of Paris to New York as glamorous exiles, but as his biographers demonstrate, this only served further to isolate the proletarian, bohemian de Kooning from success. Peggy Guggenheim, patron of the exiles, adopted his friend and rival Jackson Pollock as the cowboy genius when a homegrown modernist was required. De Kooning would frequently be a man caught between cultures, too attached to the conventions of easel painting and an ambition to extend the great figurative tradition of Rembrandt and Rubens to fit the mould of “American-type” painting as defined by his amenuensis Clement Greenberg. (De Kooning’s great champion was Greenberg’s rival Harold Rosenberg, along with Artnews editor Tom Hess, who was his hagiographer.) His gritty, urban, essentially body-bound art bucked the trend towards the mystical and the oceanic in such abstractionists as Pollock and Rothko.

And yet, much as his “cuties,” as his notoriously gutsy, violent, angst-filled portraits of women to which he reverted after his breakthrough black and white abstractions of the late 1940s were labelled, drew upon vernacular culture, he was old hat to the emerging, and oedipally displacing, pop artists. Robert Rauschenberg famously requested a de Kooning drawing from which to make his symbolic “Erased de Kooning”; equally famously, de Kooning consented, painstakingly picking out an inferior drawing that would take many weeks to rub out.

The biographers are compassionate but unrelenting in their analysis of de Kooning’s relations with women, and his descent into alcoholism. In both cases, ironically for so willful an “action painter,” passivity was the norm. A friend recommended a drop of whisky to allieviate heart palpitations, and he found the same cure worked for lethargy in the mornings; for the Depression years, nickel cups of coffee and the occasional beer was all he drunk. As for women, he could never bring himself to divorce Elaine Fried, with whom he was only properly together for a few years (she would return to his life as caretaker during his dementia, although she predeceased him) even as the mother of his illegitimate daughter clung to the ideal of marriage and family stability. The tendency was for his great loves to overlap in painful, distended menages-à-trois.’

one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite artists.

Tags: willem de kooning

nickkahler:

Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan, “Willem de Kooning (1904-97): An American Master” Photograph, 1960 (text via artcritical)

‘The Second World War brought the School of Paris to New York as glamorous exiles, but as his biographers demonstrate, this only served further to isolate the proletarian, bohemian de Kooning from success. Peggy Guggenheim, patron of the exiles, adopted his friend and rival Jackson Pollock as the cowboy genius when a homegrown modernist was required. De Kooning would frequently be a man caught between cultures, too attached to the conventions of easel painting and an ambition to extend the great figurative tradition of Rembrandt and Rubens to fit the mould of “American-type” painting as defined by his amenuensis Clement Greenberg. (De Kooning’s great champion was Greenberg’s rival Harold Rosenberg, along with Artnews editor Tom Hess, who was his hagiographer.) His gritty, urban, essentially body-bound art bucked the trend towards the mystical and the oceanic in such abstractionists as Pollock and Rothko.
And yet, much as his “cuties,” as his notoriously gutsy, violent, angst-filled portraits of women to which he reverted after his breakthrough black and white abstractions of the late 1940s were labelled, drew upon vernacular culture, he was old hat to the emerging, and oedipally displacing, pop artists. Robert Rauschenberg famously requested a de Kooning drawing from which to make his symbolic “Erased de Kooning”; equally famously, de Kooning consented, painstakingly picking out an inferior drawing that would take many weeks to rub out.
The biographers are compassionate but unrelenting in their analysis of de Kooning’s relations with women, and his descent into alcoholism. In both cases, ironically for so willful an “action painter,” passivity was the norm. A friend recommended a drop of whisky to allieviate heart palpitations, and he found the same cure worked for lethargy in the mornings; for the Depression years, nickel cups of coffee and the occasional beer was all he drunk. As for women, he could never bring himself to divorce Elaine Fried, with whom he was only properly together for a few years (she would return to his life as caretaker during his dementia, although she predeceased him) even as the mother of his illegitimate daughter clung to the ideal of marriage and family stability. The tendency was for his great loves to overlap in painful, distended menages-à-trois.’

one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite artists.