de Kooning: An American Master

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan spent roughly ten years writing this life of Willem de Kooning, following him from a working class childhood in Rotterdam, where his parents divorced when he was three and he left school at twelve to apprentice with commercial decorators, through night classes at Rotterdam's Academy of Fine Arts that gave him formal training few of his later American peers ever had. The book follows de Kooning's 1926 arrival in the United States as a stowaway on a freighter bound for Argentina that landed him instead in Newport News, Virginia, and the two decades of house painting, carpentry, and government mural work that supported him while he developed, largely outside any gallery system, the loose, aggressive style that would eventually define Abstract Expressionism.

Stevens and Swan give the Woman paintings, the series de Kooning began in 1950 and returned to for years, the book's fullest attention, tracing how the fractured, aggressive female figures drew on Picasso's example even as critics like Harold Rosenberg read them as a single obsessive subject worked and reworked until it became de Kooning's signature. The book follows his rise alongside Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline into the center of the New York School, his volatile marriage to the painter Elaine de Kooning, and the alcoholism that shadowed both of them for decades even as his reputation and prices climbed.

The authors do not look away from the end: by the late 1980s de Kooning was losing his memory to what doctors eventually diagnosed as Alzheimer's disease, and yet he kept painting into 1991, work whose authorship later scholars have genuinely debated. Reading the book means following a meticulously reported, sometimes hard biography of an artist whose late decline complicates rather than diminishes an already turbulent life, and it suits a reader who wants the art explained alongside the very difficult man who made it.