Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

Born in Rotterdam, Holland on April 24, 1904, de Kooning worked for a commercial art company during the day and studied art at night at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. He moved to America in 1926 and worked as a house painter in Hoboken, New Jersey before moving to New York in 1927. When he was 31, he got a job working for a federal art project doing murals.

The major influences on his work were Cubism, a school of painting developed in France in the early 1900s in which natural forms and objects were depicted as geometric objects, and Surrealism. He had his first solo display in 1948. One of his favorite themes was women and during an interview in 1963, he said, "At one time, it was very daring to make a figure red or blue - I think now that it is just as daring to make it flesh-colored." De Kooning's work is full of color and shapes that seem to be in motion. It also has a lot of playfulness, as if sometimes he is telling people not to take everything in life so seriously.

De Kooning returned to Holland for the first time in 1968 to attend a show of his work. The next year he began sculpting, and continued working for the next 20 years, in addition to attending shows of his art. Between 1981 and 1989, he produced more than 300 works but in 1990, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and died on March 19, 1997 in East Hampton, New York.

De Kooning is an Abstract Expressionist painter and founder of the New York school of Action Painting, a technique that other modern artists used extensively. He did one of his most famous oil paintings, Whose Name Was Writ in Water, in 1975 when he was 71 years old. The title was inspired by the 19th century English poet John Keats.