Photos of Willem de Kooning, Unseen Until Now
The Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning, a seminal figure in Abstract Expressionism and 20th-century art, came to the United States in 1926 as a stowaway on a freighter bound for Argentina. He first made a living painting houses in Hoboken, N.J., and settled in New York City in 1927.
Among his best-known pieces are 'Excavation,' (1950) one of his largest works, and the paintings in his 'Woman' series, whose abstract — to some, grotesque — depictions of the female form caused controversy when they were first exhibited in the early 1950s.
By 1951, de Kooning owned property in East Hampton, N.Y. He was one of a number of artists, including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who made a home in that part of Long Island. The area had been regarded as a haven for artists since the 19th century.
In 1965, Grace Glueck, an arts reporter for The New York Times, ventured to the Hamptons to visit de Kooning, as well as other artists living in the area. Among the paintings de Kooning produced around this time were another 'Woman' piece and several untitled charcoal drawings.
Glueck's article was published on Aug. 16 of that year with the headline 'Artists Follow Sun to the Hamptons and Followers Follow Artists.' In the newspaper, the article included a photograph taken by the Times photographer Allyn Baum of de Kooning leaning on a cluttered worktable in the giant studio of his then-unfinished house in Springs, a hamlet in East Hampton. Other painters mentioned in the article included Adolph Gottlieb, Balcomb Greene and Alfonso Ossorio.
Baum took more photos of de Kooning in his art space, but they were not published. The negatives from that shoot are stored in one of the Times's archival libraries..
But The Times's art department developed some of them a few months ago. One shows de Kooning, who died in 1997, at work in his art space, applying brush to canvas; another shows him with Ms. Glueck. An image of the pair from that same 1965 photo shoot was published with Ms. Glueck's obituary in 2022.
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