Willem De Kooning Drawing

A career-spanning look at Willem de Kooning’s singular drawing practice

Known for his dynamic blend of drawing and painting, Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) did not believe in a distinction between the two mediums. In a career spanning seven decades, he explored the interrelation between drawing and painting to express a variety of recurring genres, themes, and motifs. Focusing on de Kooning’s drawing practice, this publication emphasizes materials, process, and technique to uncover how the artist achieved his characteristic active line.

Before moving to New York in the 1920s and joining his contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, in the “New York School” movement, de Kooning was rigorously trained in draftsmanship at the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences, Rotterdam, where he achieved mastery of traditional techniques at a young age. Willem de Kooning Drawing features nearly 250 works from the early 1920s to the 1980s, revealing the centrality of drawing to all aspects of his practice. Essays by eminent and emerging scholars and curators approach de Kooning’s work from a variety of perspectives―from examining his concept of “the glimpse” to reinterpreting his representations of women―demonstrating the artist’s enduring resonance.

Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago in association with the Rijksmuseum