What played out on the canvases of Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning and Pollock as the Cold War cast its shadow over the world was not only a battle for preeminence on the art scene. It was also a struggle to project a world picture that was capable of coming to terms with the devastating blow to civilization that was World War II. Rational thinking had miserably failed, and had revealed its cruel, inhumane side. Reason, as an ethical corrective, seemed to have lost all validity. How could art react to this state of affairs? For de Kooning, the only possible reply was to look at things close up. The painting that caused a scandal and established his reputation, Woman I (p. 6), virtually presses the viewer's nose into the paint, the flesh of the painting embodied in expressive gestures.Flesh, de Kooning declared in 1950, was the reason oil painting was invented.

Abstract Expressionism, a term first used in The New Yorker in 1946, began its meteoric rise. Following the Ninth Street Show a group exhibition curated by Leo Castelli in May 1951 that brought the Kooning to prominence, in 1953 the artist mounted his third one-man show; that same year a first retrospective was even on view in Boston. In spring 1953, de Kooning had his first one-man show with Sidney Janis, a then already highly influential dealer of avant-garde art. De Kooning soon reigned supreme in the New York art world of the 195os. As the artcritic Irving Sandler recalled, De Kooning was admired for his integrity and dedication to art - qualities which were thought by many (including me) to be embodied in his painting.

Willem de Kooning: An Erasure

From Rotterdam to New York

De Koonings Women: Scandal and Success

De Kooning in East Hampton: Almost a Pastorale

Launching into the Third Dimension: Sculptures

Between Remembering and Forgetting:Late Paintings, the 1970s and 1980s

Chronology