Artist

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist (between the 1940's and 1950's was when this art style was booming). He was born on April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam in Holland, and he died on March 19, 1997 in East Hampton in New York. While he was considered to be one of the most prominent Abstract Expressionists of his time, he did not like sticking to that label and the label's definitions. For example, he was heavily influenced by Cubism (so painters such as Picasso). He also kept figures in his paintings unlike other Abstract Expressionists. While he had these figures be his subjects in some of his paintings, he still was able to abstract them away and blend them into the background of the canvas. He is apparently known for painting with "angry vigor", but at the same time he was careful and precise about his pieces, and "he is thought to have possessed the greatest facility and polished techniques of painters in the New York School". He was also known for leaving his paintings with a sense of incompleteness about them "as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition".