de Kooning: An American Master

de Kooning: An American Master
by Mark Stevens, Annalyn Swan

de Kooning: An American Master
List Price: $27.50
Our Price: $16.86
You Save: $10.64 (39%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $10.95 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Annalyn Swan, Mark Stevens
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-04-13
ISBN: 0375711163
Number of pages: 732
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Book Reviews of de Kooning: An American Master

Book Review: Extremely illuminating
Summary: 5 Stars

I loved this book. It covers de Kooning's art and his personal life in great detail. I found this book to be very enlightening not only on de Kooning, but on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism, the rise of modern art in America (specifically in New York), and on modern art in general.

I found it fascinating to learn that the influential art critic Clement Greenberg viewed de Kooning's "Woman" paintings as an abandonment of abstract painting and a turn away from the forward evolution of modernism. To use today's parlance, de Kooning had "jumped the shark", according to Greenberg. When you look at much of the art (or non-art) of today, consider this position taken by Greenberg. In regards to this, I would also highly recommend Tom Wolfe's excellent book "The Painted Word". Wolfe basically rips modern art a new one, and puts much of the blame on Greenberg.

I have always liked de Kooning to a large extent, but have had a lot of difficulty with some of his work. Reading about the vicissitudes of de Kooning's personal life has tremendously increased my understanding and appreciation of his art.

This is a beautiful book: informative, poignant, and thoroughly captivating. Without question this is the best book I have read in quite a while.

Summary of de Kooning: An American Master

Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true "painter's painter" whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.

The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school-just as American art began to dominate the international scene.

Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure-and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O'Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer's, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.

This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.


From the Hardcover edition.
Gossipier than any tabloid, as scholarly as Vasari, luminously illustrated and illuminating as a lightning bolt, Stevens' and Swan's landmark biography is one of the most stunning art books I've seen in seven years of Amazon.com reviewing--a masterpiece that explains how the Dutchman de Kooning became the master painter of the American century. It's a page-turning tale: raised by a mom who beat him with wooden shoes, de Kooning escaped Rotterdam as a stowaway on a freighter and found a second family in New York's rampageous art bohemia. He subsisted on ketchup and booze, and broke through around 1950 with dazzling abstract expressionist canvases inspired by what was in the air: cubism, surrealism, jazz, and film noir. The careerist thing to do would've been to ride the Ab Ex tsunami, but de Kooning stubbornly defied purist abstraction with the startlingly quasi-figurative Woman paintings. Stevens and Swan artfully show how much went into these notorious works. De Kooning's Woman is "part vamp, part tramp," a Hollywood pinup girl with push-up bazooms, a dirty joke and a scary goddess based on a Mexican deity to whom hearts were sacrificed. She is also part Mom and part Elaine de Kooning, his artist/muse wife, and the numberless women he juggled.

He called himself a "slipping glimpser," and this book helps us see what he saw. Nobody has ever made de Kooning's slippery meanings and painstaking techniques clearer, in every phase, even the mysterious late paintings evincing the artist's advancing Alzheimer's-like illness. Now I finally get what essentially distinguished de Kooning from his rivalrous pals Gorky and Pollock, and more. I also know what de Kooning was like in bed (loud), how he managed to cheat on five steady lovers at a time(different doorbell codes), why he slept drunk in gutters even after he got rich, and how deeply he loved and how coldly he used women. Stevens and Swan manage to do what no dame ever did: they pin down his oblique soul. --Tim Appelo

De Kooning, Willem Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in The Hamptons List
Playboy, July 2007 Issue ImagePlayboy, July 2007 Issue
by Editors of PLAYBOY Magazine
Playboy; Published: 2007-06-23; Single Issue Magazine; Book
Best price: $0.95
Price in other shops: $5.99
The  Lost  Hamptons   (NY)  (Postcard  History  Series) ImageThe Lost Hamptons (NY) (Postcard History Series)
by Steven Petrow, Richard Barons
Arcadia Publishing; Published: 2004-04-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.00
Price in other shops: $24.99
Voices of Sag Harbor: A Village Remembered ImageVoices of Sag Harbor: A Village Remembered
by Edited by Nina Tobier with a Foreword by E. L. Doctorow
Harbor Electronic Publishing; Published: 2007-06-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.95
Keeping Time in Sag Harbor (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places) ImageKeeping Time in Sag Harbor (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)
by Stephen Longmire
Center for American Places; Published: 2007-08-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $65.00
The Beach House ImageThe Beach House
by James Patterson, Peter De Jonge
Grand Central Publishing; Published: 2003-05-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.85
Price in other shops: $7.99
Meet The Writers: The Steinbeck Project: 1978-2002 ImageMeet The Writers: The Steinbeck Project: 1978-2002
Harbor Electronic Pub; Published: 2002-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.95
Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintences and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career ImageTruman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintences and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career
by George Plimpton
Anchor; Published: 1998-11-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.96
Price in other shops: $16.95
Houses of the Hamptons 1880-1930 (The Architecture of Leisure) ImageHouses of the Hamptons 1880-1930 (The Architecture of Leisure)
by Anne Surchin, Gary Lawrance
Acanthus Press; Published: 2007-06-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $60.90
Price in other shops: $85.00
Georgica Pond ImageGeorgica Pond
by Priscilla Rattazzi
Callaway; Published: 2000-09-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops: $25.00
The House That Ate the Hamptons: A Novel of Lily Pond Lane (Beecher Stowe and Lady Alex Dunraven Novels) ImageThe House That Ate the Hamptons: A Novel of Lily Pond Lane (Beecher Stowe and Lady Alex Dunraven Novels)
by James Brady
St. Martin's Paperbacks; Published: 2000-06-15; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.24
Price in other shops: $6.99
Similar Books and other products
Mark Rothko ImageMark Rothko
Skira; Published: 2008-06-10; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $46.05
Price in other shops: $75.00
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908 ImageThe Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908
by Hilary Spurling
Knopf; Published: 1998-11; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $43.36
Price in other shops: $50.00
The Accidental Masterpiece : On the Art of Life and Vice Versa ImageThe Accidental Masterpiece : On the Art of Life and Vice Versa
by Michael Kimmelman
Published: 2005-08-18; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.49
Price in other shops: $24.95
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer ImageAmerican Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin
Vintage; Published: 2006-04-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.95
Price in other shops: $17.95
Jackson Pollock: An American Saga ImageJackson Pollock: An American Saga
by Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith
Woodward/White, Incorporated; Published: 1998-09-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $25.00
A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 ImageA Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
by John Richardson
Knopf; Published: 2007-11-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $24.00
Price in other shops: $40.00
Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) ImagePictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)
by Kirk Varnedoe
Princeton University Press; Published: 2006-10-09; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $28.21
Price in other shops: $45.00
Mark Rothko: A Biography ImageMark Rothko: A Biography
by James E. B. Breslin
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 1993-11-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $29.99
Price in other shops: $45.00
Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 ImageMatisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954
by Hilary Spurling
Knopf; Published: 2007-10-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.47
Price in other shops: $25.95
Willem De Kooning: Paintings 1960-1980 ImageWillem De Kooning: Paintings 1960-1980
by Ralph Ubl, Klaus Kertess, Willem de Kooning
Hatje Cantz Publishers; Published: 2005-11-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $37.80
Price in other shops: $60.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories