Drawing

Description

Dutch-born Willem de Kooning was raised in Holland and studied commercial art and design at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts before emigrating to America at the age of 24. Earning a living as a sign and house painter, de Kooning settled in New York in the 1930s and formed friendships with artists John Graham and Arshile Gorky. With them de Kooning was soon part of a larger circle of painters in New York who would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists. De Kooning turned to abstraction yet never altogether abandoned the human figure. Beginning in the 1940s with a series of paintings of men, de Kooning redefined the human body through the dissolution of the figure into fragmented yet clearly human forms. The following decade, de Kooning’s focus turned to women, perhaps his best-known and most enduring theme. Exagerrated, enigmatic, monstrous and often unsettling, de Kooning’s women were a vehicle through which he could explore a gestural, rhythmic hand in an experimental approach between medium and subject. In the 1960s he took up lithography often returning to his paintings and drawings as sources for his printed images.
In Drawing we see an example of his lithography work of the early 1970s. Based upon an earlier drawing of ca. 1969-72 entitled Two Figures, this simple composition is comprised of two female forms. The figures are seated as indicated by the profile views of thighs, bent knees, and calves though the gestural, spontaneous lines suggest a sense of movement or, perhaps, an undercurrent of energy.
Katie Weiss, Research Assistant, on the occasion of the exhibition The New York School: Abstract Expressionism and Beyond and Beyond, July 20, 2002 – January 19, 2003