This was an extremely difficult read and is even more so to review. I feel as though I don't know enough about art and painting to offer an adequate evaluation. It was the not knowing of this topic that drew me to this bio, and the best thing I did gain from this is a heightened appreciate for paintings.

As a musician, I'm always fascinated by any artist's creative process, but what's to be done if you get too close? Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and New York Times 10 Best Books of 2005 as a result of this penetrating and painstakingly well-researched book. They get so close to their subject that I imagine avid fans of de Kooning would be dismayed by even a glimpse of his every day reality outside his paintings. Without giving too much away, this guy was a tragedy from beginning to end. I like the idea of reading the beginning and end of a entire life, and for that, this books is quite admirable. Also, the amount of detail and insight to the private life of de Kooning is prize-worthy on its own. This is clearly a life's-work type of book for both Stevens and Swan, and it shows in every sentence. The passages devoted to the critique of de Kooning's paintings were poetic and illustrious.

But while I respect him, I'm still not sure I love de Kooning's art. (There's many examples printed in the book, and I frequently looked up pieces online as I read. Often, I found myself more enamored by his contemporaries.) I'm certain that I would not have enjoyed having a personal relationship with him, but if he was in a NYC coffee shop giving a lecture to a friend (a common practice of de Kooning), I'd probably hop a flight right now just to eavesdrop. de Kooning was endlessly fascinating, and this biography illustrates this beautifully. It magnifies its subject and gives the artist the respect he deserves.

If you're at all curious about modern art in America, I imagine this bio would be an excellent starting place.

My life got became pretty crazy when I was reading this 650-page epic, which lead to my reading it over the course of many weeks - much longer than it usually takes me to finish a book (especially a book as compulsively readable as this one) By the time I'd reached the end, I felt like I'd spent a life time with it - probably due to a combination of its scale, scope, complexity, and of course, it's subject.

There's something huge-seeming about de Kooning's life, and it fittingly deserves no less than the maniacal attention to detail that Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan bring to this project. One has the feeling while immersed that de Kooning's personal history set a mold for the rags-to-riches mythology of a poor artist's rise to meteoric fame. As someone who has, for many years now, worked with young people in arts education, I have a unique relationship with this storyline, as well as its alarming pervasiveness in the minds of almost everyone I encounter. No matter where you stand on the matter of de Kooning's paintings, many, many people labor under the delusion that extreme poverty, alcoholism, unexplainable mood swings and a marginalized lifestyle are part and parcel of an artist's career, and that to endure them for long enough promises the prize of success on the other end. "Where did this idea come from?" I've often asked myself -- after reading de Kooning I feel like I've found my answer.

What was consistently refreshing about this excellent book was the attention paid to the working life of the artist himself, an aspect of the lifestyle that's often overshadowed by narrative of personality extremities or financial circumstance. de Kooning, it is clear from the text, worked like a motherfucker his whole like on his paintings - he didn't really like distractions, or vacations, or anything disrupting the solidity of his routine. Towards the end of his life, painting was the only activity keeping him alive. Also surprising - he experienced long periods of struggle and failure in the studio, even after he had established himself as the reigning king of Abstract Expressionism. LIke all great biographies, An American Master simultaneously adulates and humanizes its subject, working overtime to provide a historical context for the mythology surrounding this figure. And if it does anything to illuminate the complexity, difficulty and realities of the lives of artists today (which I think it does) I would characterize it less as a biography and more an act of civil service.

Biography just ain't my thing. While this one was well and transparently written i found myself unhappy with the roles of the women and not able to understand deKooning's work any better than I did before.

This autobiography deservedly netted a lot of book awards, including the Pulitzer. I'm going to do a fairly detailed review, but it only scratches the surface of this book, and is no substitute for reading it.

There was a major de Kooning retrospective at MOMA in 2011-2012 with 200 works, around the time this book was released:
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhi...

I won't label it a spoiler, because there is so much I left out, but if you hate knowing anything about a book, then you might want to stop here....

The book extensively details his Dutch background, both his troubled home life--with an abusive mother--and his short but thorough grounding in academic drawing, leading to early success in commercial art and as a chief artist in Dutch design firms.

A highly intelligent child with early signs of some degree of artistic ability, a marketable skill was the one way out of the bottom rung of the highly stratified Dutch class system, where working class children were expected to leave school at the age of twelve, no matter how promising they were. (In reading the recent van Gogh biography,Van Gogh, at the same time, I was struck by how little the insular and regimented Dutch society had changed; it is after World War II, apparently that the great movement towards a more enlightened and progressive Dutch society emerged.)

At first, he never thought of himself as a fine artist, but as a commercial and decorative painter, who privately painted for himself (at that point in a somewhat symbolist or Art Nouveau manner) --ambitions and expectations that he carried on into his journey as a stowaway to America. Early on, he exhibited a somewhat American entrepreneurial spirit, and preferred to move from working for established companies to freelancing.

This background helps in understanding many aspects of his later career. His training at the Academy had not included the more advanced classes in perspective, nor painting.

Perspective was not particularly an issue for the shallow space used in magazine illustration or commercial advertising, nor when developing his own style in a modern or abstract idiom, based on a flat sort of Cubist type space.

He was never interested in vast battle scenes or complex architectural views. Nonetheless, he seemed to exhibit early on a deep seated need for self-contradiction or paradox, by sticking difficult foreshortening into straightforward abstracted figuration, punching and flattening space into a worried surface that defied a single reading.

His training in painting came from commercial firms, and gave him practical experience in many ways that he might not have had an opportunity to learn at the academy, including shortcuts in layout, and preparation of paint. In painting, he utilized a lot of techniques that he had learned as a commercial illustrator in innovative ways in fine art, in terms of layout, transfer of images, and manipulation of materials in his paintings. He developed an art practice of using vellum-tracing paper- to cut up and transfer shapes, and even lift paint from painting to painting.

At one point in his life, he decided to stop doing commercial art and paint full time. This was a risky and conscious choice and one that his free lancing personality was willing to accept, to spend a long time, "broke but not poor", as he put it himself. Luckily, New York turned out to become the kind of art world crucible for the emergence of a new kind of painting, and interaction with other artists on the cutting edge. Particularly he picked up art theory, and techniques from Arshille Gorky, a brilliant abstract painter and autodidact, and many others, such as the extravagant John Graham. If I went into detail, this would turn into a list of famous artists, like Jackson Pollock: read the book, OK?

Returning, now to his restlessness and inability to settle down. His life was filled with paradox and disruption that seems to have been prepared by his early years. His mother was physically abusive; he loved her but disliked her. His early family life was unstable. In a strange way, he seems to have been prepared to react with both anxiety and comfort in unsettled situations, and to seek them out because of their familiarity. For a long period of apprenticeship, he labored over, and endlessly reworked paintings, and continuously brought new and difficult complications into his work that were, by their very nature impossible to take to a single resolution. He developed an underground reputation as an academically trained and skilled painter, who could draw like Ingres, but chose not to, who worked incessantly on strange paintings, but who could never finish anything.

Psychologically, de Kooning was a bundle on anxiety. He gradually learned to turn this irresolution into a kind of aesthetic, where he would bring several different things into a painting, let them fight it out, and consider a painting done when it had in his terms a "visage": a kind of theme of fragile dynamic balance. The hallmark of all his multiple styles is the ambiguity of figure and ground; the "background" will suddenly pop forward and the "foreground" recede, so that multiple paintings are embedded in one, in a disquieting and unrelenting energy. I am consciously not going to go into details about each of his several or so major styles; this review is long enough, and the book comes with adequate color illustrations, and there is plenty of material in the literature on them.



In his work he tended to build up anxiety, which would then explode into a manic burst of activity, often in a totally new style. (Many people only know, and dislike (or like) de Kooning on the basis of one style, he had seven or eight.) Then he would fall into anxiety again.



The remarkable thing I learned about the Abstract Expressionist era is that the really severe drinking of many of the artists, really came to a head, after these absolutely obscure artists began to be recognized. Partly, because with some money floating around they could afford Scotch instead of beer, partly perhaps, because there was fear of success, and partly because the Zeitgeist of the atomic era was seeking an art of anxiety, and so many of the artists that became famous at that time suffered from anxiety. (To cite just one example, Jackson Pollock, was if anything even more anxious and less mentally stable than most, and famously and tragically met his end in a booze fueled car crash.)

De Kooning was no exception. He soon feel into a cyclic pattern of alternating his periods of manic creativity alternating with manic binge drinking. For the most part, the first part of the cycle, de Kooning was alert, witty charismatic, and would pretty much go without sleep for three or four days, then he would fall into a stupor, and finally black out on the street, in an alleyway, or in a park, and his many friends would have to organize a search to locate and rescue him.

In his life he would never resolve anything. He lived alternately with his wife, the mother of his child, Joan Ward, and several different girlfiends. In this particular aspect you can see a commonality between his art and his life. He was not consciously cruel in in this bohemian life style, just rather helpless to live any other way. His daughter Lisa said that he was definitely not a good father, but she was just as equally certain that he loved her very much. At this point he had become enormously successful but was a very troubled man and deeply sunk in alcoholism.


His wife, Elaine de Kooning, an artist with a significant reputation in her own right, came to have more of an influence in his life again after a number of years. She was a heavy drinker too and started to try to get fellow artists to go on the wagon after she joined AA. She set a project to get de Kooning dried up, and reorganize his life. As a result, he was able to have a very long and productive life. His art started to take on a light, fluid pastoral quality, more influenced by Matisse and impressionism, less edgy, and more graceful.


But not so fast. It was a sad ending.

After a number of years, when he reached old age, he began to suffer significant memory lapses. He had significant cognitive reserves visually; it was said if he couldn't remember someone's name it would come to him when he drew them. Ultimately the diagnosis was Alzheimer's. He continued to paint for a number of years; Elaine organized the studio so that all his equipment and paints would be set out for him, and all his legal and routine affairs would be arranged. There is general consensus that this studio routine kept off the onset of dementia for a number of years as his mind was actively engaged. There is also somewhat of a critical consensus, that although not as edgy and anxious as his earlier work, his better late "ribbon paintings" take on a beautiful elegance and compression, and do indicate an artist at the top of his craft.

One of the greatest biographies I've read. Of course, I love de Kooning anyway, so that helps. It did win a pulitzer though, I can see why.

This man worked in absolute solitude, and he worked all the time. I think about his process and what it means for my own work almost daily.

This book is really interesting. But this book is also very very long, so, unfortunately, I didn't make it past DeKooning's early twenties. I own this book, though, because I found it in an airport, so maybe it will take me four years to get through it, but I have that luxury.

The two authors have devoted a good piece of their lives to documenting deKooing's. The book clearly focuses on the artist and his artistic legacy. A byproduct of this giant effort is a history of America's emergence in the world of art. The authors show how a small group of literally starving artists survived, and how and why deKooning reaped worldwide recognition and wealth as he became the literal survivor.

There are many striking things about deKooning's story. The first is the total deprivation of love and support he suffered as a child. The last is the long goodbye which he said through the fog of alcoholism and Alzheimer's.

The authors stick with deKooning, his art, his personal life, his success and failure and his impact in the art world. They are neutral and do not assess him as he throws drinks at people, breaks furniture and humiliates intimate friends.

DeKooning's manner of raising his daughter is attributed to his abusive birth family, but the authors make no comment on its most probable impact on the unstable relationships with women (which he cannot sever) and give only a passing mention of its potential influence in creating his visually misogynistic "Woman" paintings.

Other absent themes of the book are the historic events outside the art world. Pearl Harbor, the McCarthy witch hunts and the JFK assassination are hardly (or not) mentioned. World War II has a mention as Rotterdam is burned, but this is dropped. Pages later, when his Dutch family re-surfaces there is no description of their (or much related to the war or about deKooning's) war experience.

I do like a book that sticks to its mission, and this one does, so I while I'd like to know more of the psychology of deKooning and the impact of major events on him and his art, the authors stay with their expertise. I give them 5 stars for their research and ability to present it in a readable way. I hope that others will take on these other aspects of, perhaps, the most provocative artist of the 20th century.

I have always admired de Kooning's paintings, but I never really had a vision of what his life might have been like until I read this book. Although it is a fat book, I could not put it down! Not only was it the fascinating story of the life of a famous painter, but the author gave us a picture of the art world in New York during the rise of abstract expressionism and beyond.

Een biografie die je noopt om er eens rustig bij te gaan zitten. In ruim 600 pagina’s doorploegen de auteurs leven en werk van De Kooning.
Het archetype van het getormenteerde genie vormt de rode draad. Een moeilijke onstabiele jeugd, schrijnende armoede, rudimentaire werkomstandigheden, een schier eindeloze rij affaires en scharrels, destructief alcoholgebruik,… niks ontbreekt. Maar op bijna onverklaarbare wijze haalt de scholing, het ambachtelijk vakmanschap, de genialiteit,… steeds opnieuw de bovenhand. Het resulteerde in een carrière die zowat 7 decennia overspant en bakens verzette in de geschiedenis van de schilderkunst.
Zelfs als je niet altijd weet wat je van zijn werk, of bij uitbreiding de abstracte expressionisten, moet denken, dan nog stijgt bij ieder hoofdstuk je fascinatie voor deze uitgeweken Hollander.

This brick of a book took me through a very hot summer month, filling in my art-world cracks. De Kooning lived in Hoboken. Everyone lived in Hoboken.

best artist bio i can recall reading. please recommend others.