Willem De Kooning

WILLEM DE KOONING (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1904 - Long Island, USA, 1997).
"Valentine," 1971.
Lithograph on Japan paper. Copy 40/47.
Certificate of authenticity attached.
Justified and dated in pencil.
Measurements: 93,5 x 71,5 cm; 102 x 80 cm (frame).
Lithograph in which you can appreciate the characteristic style of the author, influenced by the gestures and expression linked to an active exercise by the painter. Which in a certain way implies an active and truthful exploration regarding the exercise of painting, resulting in this aesthetic where chance seems to influence in a certain way. Valentine is a series in which de Kooning was working since 1947, an example of this is the work that the MoMA has.
Willem de Kooning is one of the main representatives of American abstract expressionism, specifically of gestural painting or "action painting". He began his training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, where he remained for eight years, and in 1920 he began working with the artistic director of a department store. In 1926 he emigrated to the United States clandestinely, settling in New Jersey as a house painter. Only a year later he moved to Manhattan and took up painting again, at this first moment within a figurative language that reflected the influence of the Parisian school and Mexican muralism. At the beginning of the following decade he began to experiment with abstraction, using organic forms and simple geometric compositions, an opposition of disparate formal elements that would be a constant in his work from then on. From the forties onwards, de Kooning became increasingly identified with abstract expressionism, and by the mid-fifties he was already recognized as one of its most important representatives. His work will be oriented towards complex and agitated abstractions, which reintroduce the color of his figurative stage and manage to solve the problems of composition by free association with which he had struggled for years. Now fully established, from the 1950s onwards he would combine his artistic practice with teaching, teaching summer courses at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, and also at the Yale University School of Art. Although de Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s, and again between 1947 and 1949, it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively, at the height of his artistic creativity. In the summer of that year he began his most famous series, which began with "Woman I" (MOMA, New York) and focused on the figure of women. Later he returned to a certain lyricism with works such as "Whose name was writ in water", and from 1970 he began to create large sculptures induced by Henry Moore. During his last years he became more and more inclined to create large clay sculptures. In 1960 he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in Washington, in 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1968 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Arts. Outside the United States he was recognized with the Max Beckmann Prize in Frankfurt am Main (1984). De Kooning is represented in the world's leading modern art museums, including MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.