1965 Pencil Signed Willem de Kooning Exhibition Poster

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1965Pencil Signed On Bottom Willem de Kooning Exhibition Poster for Exhibition at Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (Summer 1965) Poster is mounted on backing board with some fading. Signature is pencil signed in the lower right corner below the printed signature for the exhibition poster. Dimensions: 29x20" Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam , the Netherlands. In the post- World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting , and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School . Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock , Franz Kline , Arshile Gorky , Mark Rothko , Hans Hofmann , Adolph Gottlieb , Robert Motherwell , Philip Guston and Clyfford Still . De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather. His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store. de Kooning was one of the thirty-eight artists choosen from a general invitation to New York City metropolitan artists to design and paint the 105 public murals at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1938, probably under the influence of Arshile Gorky , De Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing , Man , and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy . As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man , along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels . In 1938, De Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning , whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s and thereafter, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. In 1948, De Kooning had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51. In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions; of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, whereas Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947/48) are white with black. Developing out of these works in the period after his first show were complex, agitated abstractions such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute of Chicago ), which reintroduced color and seem to sum up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years. The hallmark of de Kooning's style was an emphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity. Background figures would overlap other figures causing them to appear in the foreground, which in turn might be overlapped by dripping lines of paint thus positioning the area into the background. De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions were derived from objects found in the studio. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he b... read more

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