Latest news with #deKooning
Vogue
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
They Grew Up Together in the Hamptons. Now, They're Reshaping the Local Art Scene
The de Kooning Clan 'I just started using color in my drawings,' says Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, 29, as she leads me through the living room of her childhood home in Springs, the woodsy, low-profile hamlet of East Hampton, New York. She gestures to a stack of pastel watercolors on the coffee table. 'Color is always more fun.' Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve Photo: Alessandra Schade I haven't seen Lucy in over a decade; her white-blond hair, once long and tangled from daily ocean swims, is now straight and cropped at the chin. Her raspy laugh is endearingly familiar, as is the buzz of guests drifting through the open kitchen. It's a cloudless day in May, and she's set up a makeshift studio on the patio: two easels and a low wooden table with bubbling paint tubes and brushes. Lucy is part of a long line of de Koonings who have made art in or around this backyard. Her grandfather Willem de Kooning bought the land in 1963, building a house and studio on a few wild acres off Springs Fireplace Road. On the opposite end of the oak-dotted lawn, his two-story studio still stands, filled with paintings cloaked in plastic wrap. His wife and artistic counterpart, Elaine de Kooning, kept a studio across the narrow harbor in the North West Woods; and Lucy's mother, Lisa de Kooning, sculpted bronze-cast animals—elephants, cows, rams—many of which still keep watch over the house. And then, in high school, it was us—a scruffier coalition of local teen artists who worked across various mediums at the de Kooning residence: sculpture (constructing launch ramps for our skateboards), interior design (holding Lucy upside down to stamp painted footprints on the ceiling), and performance art (how many times could one listen to Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'?). Growing up, the de Kooning home became an unofficial meeting ground for creative tomfoolery: Lisa de Kooning was a firm believer in play. 'With my mom, there was always paint, art, animals, and fun,' she says. Lisa adopted all kinds of animals for the property: Sara and Joe, the mini ponies; pigs (Peter, Wilbur, Daisy, and Dude); a Clydesdale named Bubba; and Lulu, a white cockatoo. She also helped turn Lucy's bedroom into what we all called 'the neon room,' a UV-lit sanctuary where friends had free reign to paint on the walls, so long as they didn't tag their names, which was deemed 'boring' by the de Kooning clan.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Corrections: March 27, 2025
An article on Sunday about archival photographs of the Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning referred incorrectly to de Kooning's time in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1951. Though de Kooning spent time in East Hampton in the early 1950s, he did not yet own a property there. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
New York Times
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
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.
