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de Kooning: An American Master | 
 enlarge | Authors: Mark Stevens, Annalyn Swan
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 83555
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 732
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0375711163
Dewey Decimal Number: 709.2
EAN: 9780375711169
ASIN: 0375711163
Publication Date: April 13, 2006
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Gossipier than any tabloid, as scholarly as Vasari, luminously illustrated and illuminating as a lightning bolt, Stevens' and Swan's landmark biography is one of the most stunning art books I've seen in seven years of Amazon.com reviewing--a masterpiece that explains how the Dutchman de Kooning became the master painter of the American century. It's a page-turning tale: raised by a mom who beat him with wooden shoes, de Kooning escaped Rotterdam as a stowaway on a freighter and found a second family in New York's rampageous art bohemia. He subsisted on ketchup and booze, and broke through around 1950 with dazzling abstract expressionist canvases inspired by what was in the air: cubism, surrealism, jazz, and film noir. The careerist thing to do would've been to ride the Ab Ex tsunami, but de Kooning stubbornly defied purist abstraction with the startlingly quasi-figurative Woman paintings. Stevens and Swan artfully show how much went into these notorious works. De Kooning's Woman is "part vamp, part tramp," a Hollywood pinup girl with push-up bazooms, a dirty joke and a scary goddess based on a Mexican deity to whom hearts were sacrificed. She is also part Mom and part Elaine de Kooning, his artist/muse wife, and the numberless women he juggled. He called himself a "slipping glimpser," and this book helps us see what he saw. Nobody has ever made de Kooning's slippery meanings and painstaking techniques clearer, in every phase, even the mysterious late paintings evincing the artist's advancing Alzheimer's-like illness. Now I finally get what essentially distinguished de Kooning from his rivalrous pals Gorky and Pollock, and more. I also know what de Kooning was like in bed (loud), how he managed to cheat on five steady lovers at a time(different doorbell codes), why he slept drunk in gutters even after he got rich, and how deeply he loved and how coldly he used women. Stevens and Swan manage to do what no dame ever did: they pin down his oblique soul. --Tim Appelo
Product Description
Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.
The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene.
Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.
This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Extremely illuminating February 17, 2008
I loved this book. It covers de Kooning's art and his personal life in great detail. I found this book to be very enlightening not only on de Kooning, but on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism, the rise of modern art in America (specifically in New York), and on modern art in general.
I found it fascinating to learn that the influential art critic Clement Greenberg viewed de Kooning's "Woman" paintings as an abandonment of abstract painting and a turn away from the forward evolution of modernism. To use today's parlance, de Kooning had "jumped the shark", according to Greenberg. When you look at much of the art (or non-art) of today, consider this position taken by Greenberg. In regards to this, I would also highly recommend Tom Wolfe's excellent book "The Painted Word". Wolfe basically rips modern art a new one, and puts much of the blame on Greenberg.
I have always liked de Kooning to a large extent, but have had a lot of difficulty with some of his work. Reading about the vicissitudes of de Kooning's personal life has tremendously increased my understanding and appreciation of his art.
This is a beautiful book: informative, poignant, and thoroughly captivating. Without question this is the best book I have read in quite a while.
de Kooning, an American Master January 5, 2008
When the history of art in the 20th century is written, one of the key movements of the century will be abstract expressionism -- a school of art that moved painting from a visual experience into a cerebral exploration of ideas and emotions.
It was a time in the 1940s and 50s when the focus of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. The horrors of World War II were behind us, and American culture was primed to expand. After all, Americans had led the free world to victory over Germany and Japan, and North America was seen as a new frontier. Pioneers were welcome in a world ready for change.
Even before the war, the art world was in transition. The Impressionists, the Cubists, the Fauves and the Dada movements had expanded the boundaries of creativity in painting. There were individual artists, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georges Bracque, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse who were geniuses in and of themselves. But no movement had emerged that had taken painting to the next level where the conception of artistic creativity was completely redefined.
The abstract expressionists did that.
The leading abstract expressionist was Jackson Pollock, according to current popular perception (no doubt helped by a blockbuster retrospective and a Pulitzer Prize winning biography several years ago). But there were others -- such as Hans Hoffman, Arshille Gorky, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning -- who were all driving forces in the abstract expressionist movement.
A new book, de Kooning: An American Master, gives the Dutch immigrant his due as one of the leading abstract expressionists. Indeed, at the end of the book, one has to consider de Kooning as the leader of the abstract expressionist movement. He outlasted all the others and his successive waves of well defined styles spanned five decades -- a remarkable creative achievement.
But it wasn't easy for the immigrant from the Netherlands. Arriving in America in the 1930s, de Kooning took his formal training as an illustrator into the heart of the modern art world in lower Manhattan where he began his remarkable journey. There he fell under the wing of Gorky who introduced the young Dutchman into the romanticism of the Manhattan art world. Gorky's style of painting also had a big influence on the development of de Kooning's own artwork -- nudging him from realism into the abstract.
The late 1940s were idyllic times for the young art movement, and it was then that de Kooning made his first breakthrough in a series of black enamel paintings that drew considerable attention in the art world. The black and white paintings were the subject of de Kooning's first one man show, and while the show was a flop from the standpoint of sales, the art critics raved about the new style developed by the Dutch artist. Most important, one of the most influential art critics, Clement Greenberg (who was later to be Pollock's champion) praised the ambiguity of the abstract works of art that allowed the viewer to formulate his own conception of what the artist was trying to achieve.
In 1950 de Kooning made an even greater breakthrough in a painting called Excavation -- considered one of the defining paintings of the early abstract expressionist movement. Excavation was a large painting (more than 6 X 8 feet), and de Kooning used subtle touches of color to highlight parts of the painting. The painting captured the essence of the pulsating art world in New York City. There were many interpretations of what de Kooning actually meant, but the painting itself presented itself as a living, breathing display of the energy that was gathering in art circles at that time.
"No other American painting...conveyed with comparable force the jazzy syncopation of the city," the authors write. "Excavation was a personal improvisation on the great abstract grid of modern urban life..."
At the end of the 1940s de Kooning embarked on a more controversial project -- the first of his paintings of women. His first painting in this genre, Woman I, took nearly three years to complete before he felt the work was finished. It was a startling painting, and it gave de Kooning more renown.
"Woman I was an eruption, opening a Pandora's Box, that not only liberated the demons of one man, but also released many essential issues that would bedevil art and culture during the last half of the twentieth century," the authors write. "The sexual anxiety in Woman I is palpable. It almost forces the eye away.."
In short, de Kooning had developed a theme that he would return to again and again in his career. He used his woman paintings to express his fascination with human relations, not only between men and women, but between all humans, no matter what their sex (or sexual tendencies).
But the women series also took de Kooning deeper into abstract art, and for the next 20 years his abstract work expanded and matured. His colors became more vibrant, and he used both composition and color to develop themes that fascinated the art world. Pollock's career culminated with his drip paintings from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s, but his violent personal life never took him beyond the oeuvre that he became so well known for. When he died in a suicidal traffic accident, Pollock's art abruptly died with him -- in mid-flight, it seemed.
de Kooning, on the other hand, developed a whole series of themes in his art that showed a steady progression until, between 1975 and 1980 he achieved the pinnacle of his creative work in a series of fully mature paintings (...Whose Name was Writ in Water; North Atlantic Light; and a series of untitled paintings, the most prominent of which was Untitled V). In the late 1970s he even stumbled upon sculpture as yet another dimension in his art.
But it is in his final period that de Kooning may have left his true mark.
By 1980, de Kooning's age and his alcoholism had taken their toll on the man. His mind started to deteriorate and he began to sink into the void of Alzheimer's Disease. But as he did, he developed a new style that simplified his technique. He cleaned up his slashing brush strokes and wild colors, and began to create graceful ribbons of paint on white canvases. Some critics have compared this phase of de Kooning's art with Matisse's cutouts that the French master created in his final days. Other critics scoffed at de Kooning's late work labeling it the product of a failing mind. But viewed in the overall scheme of de Kooning's career, one has to believe that the final works of art represented a cleansing of his work -- a natural summing up of a stunning body of work that neatly represented the abstract expressionist movement.
This is a marvelous book, that should give de Kooning recognition for his genius and credit for his place as the leader of the abstract expressionist movement. But here's a hint: if you read the biography, have a book of de Kooning's paintings nearby. There are some illustrations in the biography, but only a few. This reviewer happened to have a copy of the catalogue to the 1994 de Kooning retrospective organized by the National Gallery in Washington at hand -- and it was very helpful to be able to examine a reproduction of a painting even while reading the book's analysis of that painting.
Fascinating Life, Excellent Book December 30, 2007
The rise of abstract expressionism was unique and fascinating period in the history of art in America. The creative atmosphere in New York was clearly intoxicating. A rare confluence of extraordinary talents made it happen. De Kooning, Pollock, Kline and Hoffman were at the center of many notable artists. This book is a excellent examination of DeKooning's life and work, and provides considerable insight into that period.
A Flawed Hero October 7, 2007
This is the best biography of Willem de Kooning that I have come across.
Eloquently written and well illustrated, it balances nicely the personal with the artistic. It shows how the deprivations and violence of his early life in postwar Rotterdam contributed to the characteristic independence of his subsequent artistic career. In parralel, it shows how the fraught early relationship with his his parents, especially his mother, resulted in his inability to achieve a sustained sexual relationship in his adult life.
It is also a fascinating depiction of the genesis and emergence of American Art- specifically, New York Art- as a dominant force in the mid Twentieth Century.
Creating the World March 14, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This volume, "de Kooning:an American Master" by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan is a masterpiece itself. The couple took ten long years to research and write this hefty biography of Willem de Kooning and along the way give us an inside look at the creation of the world of American contemporary art from the post World War II New York period forward. Before that revealling section of the book we begin in Rotterdam following de Kooning through his difficult childhood and adolescence, his leaving of Holland (as a stowaway) his life as an immigrant in the U.S. and his slow evolvement as a painter in the new York scene (which was only evolving itself). This is a New York without contemporary galleries, agents, dealers and reps. It's artists on the loose: de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Kline and Pollack all making their way as artists and on the way creating the world of American contemporary art. I marvelled how long it took de Kooning to actually produce a body of work. He was already quite famous before he accomplished any of his break through paintings. Then there was his wife, the irrepressible Elaine and the tumult of their life together. Stevens and Swan delve into all of the cracks and crevices of De Koonings life and yet by the end I felt there was still something inscrutible and unknown about him. This book, which is telling a much larger story than just the life of Bill de Kooning, is a stunning accomplishment. Highly recommended!
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