woman

De kooning started painting Woman I in 1950 and ended in 1952. Woman I was the first of about

four paintings de Kooning worked on with the theme of a Woman. It was influenced by images

from fertility fetishes to American billboards. He reversed the traditional female repersentation

of, as he summarized " the idol, the Venus, the Nude," to painting a woman with hudge eyes, big

breasts, and a not so pretty grin. Shes out lined with in thinck and thin black lines, which loop

and streaks and drips. She is brightlly colored with strokes of orange, blue, yellow, and green.

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79810

de kooning

Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He moved to the

United States in 1926 as a stowaway on a British freighter. He soon settled in Hoboken, New

Jersey, where he became close friends with John D. Graham and Arshile Gorky, who were big

influences in his life and artistic career.



De Kooning began working on the WPA ( Works Progress Administration) in October 1935, and

won the Logan Medal of the arts. After this he was employed by a work relief program up until

1937, when he resigned. After this two year period of him employed, he had enough money to

support him self during the early years of the Depression, giving him lots of opportunity to devote

him self to his to his creative work.


Under the influences of Gorky, in 1938 de Kooning started on a series of paintings, all of males

including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure while also starting some more lyrically

colored abstraction like Pink Landscape and Elegy. As he got better, the heighten colors and

elegant lines of abstraction became more figurative, but the abstractions continued well up in to

the 1940s.

http://contemporaryartetc.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/dekoos2.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_de_Kooning

Abstract expressionism was stared as an American art movement during World War II. In

abstract expressionism, the painter typically applies paint rapidly, and with force to show

feelings and emotions, some times even throwing paint on to the canvas. The expressive method

of painting was often considered as important as the painting it self. Mostly done by Paris,

abstract expressionism was the first American movement to achieve worldwide influence and

made New York City the center of the art world. The term "Abstract expressionism" was first

used to describe a painting in a German magazine Der Sturm, they referred it to German

Expressionism. In 1929, Alfred Barr related the works of Wass and abstract Expressionism, and

was the first to use it.By the 1951, the term abstract expressionism was used for all non-

geometric abstraction art.

With in the abstract movement, there were two distinct groups: " colour field artists that

included Rothko, Newman, and Still who worked with simple unified blocks of colour; and

gestural painters like Pollock, De Kooning ans Hofman.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/abex.html
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/abstractexpr.html