How did this book win the Pulitzer? When someone chooses to read a biography about an artist, they are usually interested in the artists life and how they came to create their reputation as a master. This telling of DeKooning's life spent 5% of the read explaining his art and technique and 95% on the repetitious nihilistic behavior of drinking and sleeping around. This would have been relevant if the authors tied it to his art for each of the periods of his life. Explaining how these women and levels of intoxication changed or altered his technique and perceptions would have been an assumption in telling this artists story. Instead we are given genealogies for each mistress. I can't even applaud the effort because it feels to be pandering to the masses that watch Desperate Housewives and The Real World. If you want to find out more about DeKooning, go to Wikipedia and save yourself $25 and 630 pages of reading.

Read this while on vacation in Los Angeles. I like that de Kooning was smarter in conversation than in his paintings. His paintings are fuckin' rad.

“I didn’t want to pin it down at all. I was interested in that before, but I found out it was not in my nature. I didn’t work with the idea of perfection, but to see how far one could go.” (p. 342)

How does one pin down Willem de Kooning, the master of impasto and ambiguity? An artist that refused any reconciliation, de Kooning’s reputation for enraging and enthralling is writ large and real in this vast biography. The success of this text is two-fold. First, through exhaustive research and analysis, Stevens and Swan manage to give a detailed and clear picture of this fickle painter. But it’s the narrative qualities that make reading this book such a joy, as the authors bring not just de Kooning but the entire tumultuous mid-century New York art world to life—the time when “the individual refused to be contained by the conventional boundaries established by either European or middle class taste.” (p. 364) Sections about de Kooning laboring in his studio are incredibly vivid (as well as inspiring and, often, exhausting), and, with each struggle for artistic breakthrough, I became more and more invested in his journey. Considering how conflicting, cruel, and infuriating of a person he could be, this is, perhaps, the greatest testament to the achievements of this book.

An art biography whose strengths lie mostly in its treatment of the non-artistic aspects of de Kooning's life. Beginning with a classic and finely-rendered account of de Kooning's experience as an immigrant and moving slowly but purposefully to his emergence as as artist and the establishment of his place in the art world, Stevens and Swan give us a vivid portrait of an artist's self-discovery and the formation of a working aesthetic.

Once De Kooning is established as an artist, the narrative stumbles a bit. De Kooning's importance is assumed prior to the proving of the fact, which gives the book a slightly pretentious air and excuses a substantial and understandable analysis if his abstract work. The sections devoted to analyzing his works are invariably abrupt and at times amateurishly obvious. At times, the analysis is vague and ill-supported: probably a consequence of De Kooning's abstract style, but unconvincing nonetheless.

Still, this abstruseness is bearable, inasmuch as de Kooning's art is an expression of his personality, because his personality is sketched vividly in this book: self-confident, restless, sometimes abrasive, always intensely productive. This biography also excels in the intangibles of the biographer's art, in crystallizing its subject's personality and bringing a working grasp of how that personality bears on the characters around him. Through the messiness of De Kooning's battles with alcoholism, his high-strung love affairs, his petulant pride and his fierce individuality, the authors never let him sink to melodrama or bathos; his problems are examined honestly, objectively and effectively. Given the tumult of De Kooning's life, this book could have easily stooped to gossip and sensationalism. To its significant credit, it never does.

If you are a De Kooning fan, you'll find plenty here to admire and take pleasure in, as well as a more complete picture of the man than is offered by his art. If you aren't a fan, or are new to his work, the book's impact may be considerably lessened but it still stands as a fine example of biography.

I'm trying to make myself read more history and biographies, even when I know nothing about the topic (perhaps especially when I know nothing about the topic as then I'm learning about something completely new). I knew nothing at all about de Kooning, and I wasn't exactly psyched to read 630 pages about the man. I'm not an art buff, in fact I know very little about art, particularly modern art. I don't really understand how to appreciate random splatters and swirls of color.

Luckily this book was not 630 pages on modern art. This book was about a man; a man who lived in a very fascinating time period and was friends with a lot of very fascinating people. He was a man with an unconventional life, and this was much more the story of that life and all the people that became a part of it, than it was about the art itself. Although it also gave me a better understanding and appreciation of the art too. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago last week and looked at a few de Koonings, and while it's still hard for me to understand what makes many of his splatters of paint better than any other splatters of paint, I better understood where he was when he created that piece of art and what he was trying to express. I even found a few of the paintings quite striking. Perhaps I enjoyed this book because I expected that I wouldn't enjoy it and was pleasantly surprised, but either way it didn't feel like 630 pages about something I knew very little about.

I found this book to be a well-researched and honest narrative of de Kooning’s life and art. Elaine de Kooning was my aunt, and I had heard many of the stories in the book from her and from my father, and their siblings and others. I had met many of the artists and art critics and acquaintances of de Kooning and it was very interesting to me to learn more about their backgrounds and the historical context. This is not a short book. There is a fair amount of commentary on art movements and styles. But that seems necessary and relevant to the history.

I have never enjoyed modern art because I found it cold. This book made me change my mind about it all. De Kooning was a rock star -- lived forever, painted forever, knew everyone, lived the artist hipster's life, slept with so many beautiful women, enjoyed success in his lifetime... and kept evolving as an artist. His life is part Charles Dickens, part fantasy life for any man who has ever lived.

An amazing well written book that will keep you wanting to turn the page

booooooring

what was all the hoopla about?!

Detailed biography +600 pages of Dutch artist Willem de Kooning, who left for New York to become eventually one of the most influential artists of the century. Still I mist something, they didn't get under his skin.

Great biography, I ;love the notion of ny in the 50's and this gives real insight to the life of a starving artist discovered.

This is a well researched and well written biography of an artist whose career helped define American art in the second half of the twentieth-century. The sections about the New York art scene in the 1950's are particularly vivid. The only thing I actively disliked in this book was its treatment of Elaine de Kooning. I found it to be rather unfair to her and to her relationship with Willem de Kooning. A lot of de Kooning's female relationships were problematic, and he gets off pretty scot-free in this account.