Willem De Kooning (1904–1997)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Lineage: de Kooning and His Influence at Skarstedt, New York, this catalogue features full plate images, details, and installation photographs, as well as an essay by art historian and scholar Michael FitzGerald.

This exhibition and catalogue explore de Kooning’s influence on six significant contemporary artists: Joe Bradley, George Condo, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Sue Williams, and Christopher Wool. In the late 1980’s, with a renewal of show more focus and vision, de Kooning became “aware of his own mortality and the fragility of painting itself [and] applied himself with all deliberate speed to forge a lasting legacy” (J. Zilczer, “Chapter 5: Looking Back,” A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning, New York, Phaidon, 2014, p. 232). By considering the last decade of de Kooning’s oeuvre as a distillation of his life’s work alongside Bradley, Condo, Marden, Oehlen, Williams, and Wool, the similarities in contour and brushwork can be traced to a subsequent generation of painters, thus furthering the legacy of one of the 20th Century’s most original and influential artists. show less

Exhibition catalogue for a traveling show that started in Minneapolis and traveled to Ottawa, Washington, D.C., Buffalo and Houston. Includes 70 illustrations with several in colour.

Two letters (1946/1948) by Willem de Kooning to his father. a unique booklet that the Willem de Kooning Academy published in the context of 100 years of Willem de Kooning.
For the first time both letters appear in facsimile, in Dutch transcription and an English translation.

"De Kooning's art testifies to a refusal to be either recruited or pushed aside. His expansion of the resources of painting as a means by which the sensibility can interact with chance, impulse, the given, and the unknown, presupposes that the individual as he is will continue to oppose himself and all systems. If ideology is the ghost that haunts post-war painting, de Kooning haunts the ghost. He is the nuisance of the individual 'I am' in an age of collective credos and styles." -Harold show more Rosenberg show less