De Kooning Willem (De Kooning Willem)

(1904-1997)
De Kooning was born April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam. At age 15 he went to evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts of Painting and later studied in Brussels and Antwerp. In 1926 De Kooning emigrated to the U.S.. In 1935 he became a member of the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, at the same time began to seriously pursue painting.
At this time, De Kooning resolutely refused to exhibit his works. When in 1948, was finally organized his solo exhibition at Egan Gallery, he exhibited complex, nervous, black and white abstract compositions, opened in their author the great Art Nouveau painter. In 1951, Egan Gallery presented colorful abstract compositions de Kooning, including one of the masterpieces of the time, painting Pit (now at the Art Institute of Chicago).

For the next two years, de Kooning returned to polurealisticheskomu style. In 1953 the gallery Janice he put a few giant canvases under the same name - the woman, here some abstract biomorphic forms, . with which the artist worked in the previous decade, . again joined in the female figures, . which shocked the audience almost more, . than the first avant-garde art,
. These paintings are instantly dispersed to major museums and collections in the U.S..

In 1964-1966 De Kooning created yet another great series of tracks with the image of huge, distorted, as if trying to go beyond the pictorial space of female figures, painted on the door boards. These figures were filled with typical abstract compositions de Kooning fragments barely outlined corners and surfaces.

In 1969 and 1978 in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum held retrospective exhibitions of works de Kooning, and they have approved for the artist fame as one of the most prominent figures of contemporary American art. De Kooning died in New York on March 19, 1997.