{"id":545713,"date":"2026-03-19T01:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T01:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/545713\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T01:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T01:09:07","slug":"absolutely-transformative-willem-de-kooning-exhibition-uncovers-raw-intensity-of-early-work-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/545713\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Absolutely transformative\u2019: Willem de Kooning exhibition uncovers raw intensity of early work | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artist Willem de Kooning held his first solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in spring 1948, just shy of his 44th birthday. A smash success, the exhibition made his reputation, repositioning the artist and catapulting him to international renown by the early 1950s. By the decade\u2019s end, many would consider him the world\u2019s pre-eminent painter.<\/p>\n

Princeton University Art Museum now offers a kind of revisiting of de Kooning\u2019s transformative star-making show with Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years<\/a>, covering 1945-50. Featuring 18 paintings that reveal an artist feeling his way between figuration and abstraction, it shows de Kooning finding his own unique relationship with both styles. Although The Breakthrough Years does not feature the exact lineup of paintings from the Egan show, it does take audiences intimately into the artist\u2019s creative life from that period.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wanted to wait until he really had a body of work that he felt good about,\u201d said de Kooning expert and show co-curator John Elderfield, explaining why the painter waited so long to have his first solo show. \u201cHe came up with an exhibition that had about a dozen works.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, de Kooning had developed something of an underground reputation, highly esteemed by those in the know but not yet widely admired. The highly influential essayist and art critic Clement Greenberg helped break him out of that status with a review of the Egan Gallery show that made many more eyes turn towards him.<\/p>\n

The Breakthrough Years offers a concentrated look at many of the signature works from this particularly fertile period in de Kooning\u2019s career, giving audiences an opportunity to see such key pieces as Black Friday and Dark Pond. The show\u2019s palette is notably restricted, with blacks and tans predominating amid occasional washes of color, such as the electric yellow in Secretary and the beguiling ocher in Gansevoort Street. The artist\u2019s sinuous lines dance around the canvases in controlled ecstasies, and his exacting use of shading makes many of these works absolute feasts of negative space.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is something about him reducing his means and working without chromatic color, which really gives these paintings a kind of intensity,\u201d said Elderfield. \u201cHe\u2019s using black as a color, which makes these paintings seem extraordinarily vivid and very present.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mailbox, Willem de Kooning, 1948. Photograph: Collection of Bettina Bryant<\/p>\n

The mid- to late 1940s were a period where de Kooning worked stridently to build his art, emerging as a leader of the New York school. \u201cWhat happened in the 40s was absolutely transformative in his career,\u201d said Elderfield. \u201cHe becomes an absolutely mature artist in that five-year period.\u201d<\/p>\n

That decade saw the first museum purchase of one of his paintings; a piece simply titled Painting, acquired by MoMA in 1948, is among the works featured in The Breakthrough Years. This was also a period when de Kooning was developing a kind of rivalry with his abstract expressionist counterpart, Jackson Pollock<\/a>. \u201cPart of his development as an artist was intertwined with the fact that Pollock was making waves at the time,\u201d said Elderfield. \u201cSome of his works after the Egan exhibition seem to be in competition with Pollock.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all of de Kooning\u2019s raw talent as a creative force, he wasn\u2019t particularly savvy about marketing himself and developing his artistic career. His wife, Elaine, an artist in her own right, often acted as her husband\u2019s informal publicist, spearheading the Charles Egan show and helping de Kooning take steps to bring himself the acclaim that his art deserved. \u201cHis wife was realizing that other artists were getting a lot of coverage because they were having shows, so she pushed him to have a show,\u201d said Elderfield. \u201cI think de Kooning felt like he didn\u2019t really have a whole group of paintings together and he was being pushed along by her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elaine also helped de Kooning with a task that he had little interest in: finding titles for his paintings. Along with other supporters from the Egan gallery, Elaine participated in naming sessions where they gave the works titles. \u201cThey\u2019re all sitting in the galleries, drinking, having a good time, and they say: \u2018What are we going to call these?\u2019\u2019\u2019 said Elderfield. \u201cIt\u2019s just names they thought that people would remember them by.\u201d According to Elderfield, de Kooning cared so little about the titles of his works that it sometimes happened that a person who acquired a work would be the one to title it. \u201cIn one case someone bought a work and named it, and de Kooning didn\u2019t seem bothered by it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Bill-Lee\u2019s Delight, Willem de Kooning, 1946. Photograph: Private Collection<\/p>\n

From the 1950s onward, de Kooning would continually reinvent himself, famously moving back into figuration with his so-called woman paintings. The move was typical of the artist, who retained a maverick, anti-conformity sensibility throughout his lifetime. The decision certainly didn\u2019t go over so well with everyone. De Kooning\u2019s longtime rival Pollock deemed him a traitor for the move. \u201cPollock said: \u2018You\u2019ve betrayed the cause by making figurative paintings again,\u2019\u201d Elderfield said.<\/p>\n

The woman paintings did, however, resonate with Bob Dylan, whom Elderfield personally escorted through the MoMA\u2019s monster 2011 de Kooning show, a show that he himself organized. \u201cBob Dylan said he wanted to go through the show with me, and he remarked how de Kooning\u2019s style kept changing all the time,\u201d Elderfield said. \u201cWhen we got to the woman paintings, he told me: \u2018This is when de Kooning went electric.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

De Kooning has continued to resonate to the present day, with his works setting records for the prices they fetch. In 2015, his work Interchange made headlines when its sale for $300m set a record at the time for the highest price for a painting. According to Elderfield, the paintings that garner such stratospheric prices are quite flashier than the ones shown at The Breakthrough Years. \u201cThe ones that are bravura paintings are the ones that seem to attract people most,\u201d he said. \u201cCollectors like to have works where people come into their home and say: \u2018Oh, look at the de Kooning!\u2019 but they probably won\u2019t say it about these works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paintings also continue to resonate with other artists, with sculptor Richard Serra among those who have been inspired by the paintings shown in The Breakthrough Years. In the end, working with de Kooning is an embarrassment of riches. \u201cTrying to do a selection of de Kooning\u2019s work is like picking clouds from the sky,\u201d said Elderfield. \u201cThere\u2019s too many of them.\u201d The 18 paintings on show at Princeton certainly show why.<\/p>\n

Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945\u201350<\/a> is at Princeton University Art Museum until 26 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artist Willem de Kooning held his first solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in spring 1948, just shy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-545713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}