Praeterita

'De Kooning: An American Master' by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf, 2004), has everything you need in the biography of an artist: lots of interesting detail about his early life (Holland, poverty, apprenticeship, emigration); glamorous bohemian poverty in the New York of the 1940s; making it as an artist, getting drunk and fighting in the Cedar tavern in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s; multiple marriages, infidelities, a final descent into dementia; and lots of great work. The authors tell all this at great length, yet always at a level that sustains your interest. The following extract is part of their introductory summary to De Kooning's life: Introduction, p. xvi Surprisingly, this was the first major biography of De Kooning in English, even though it came out in 2004. I bought and read it then, and its glorious picture of the artistic milieu of post-war New York still stays with me. ( Buy it here .)   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Above is a late painting by Willem de Kooning. Setting aside the debate about whether, because of his advancing Alzheimer's, he really knew what he was making, the big looping linearity of his late style is unmistakable. Now look at what I saw in the car park of a shopping mall just off I-90 in north-western New York State, where Patty and I stopped for some grub on our drive back from Maine: Over time they had made so many repairs to the cracks in the tarmac that they accidentally created an homage to Willem de Kooning. Judging by the way people were looking at me, and nearly driving over me, as I knelt on the blistering surface and took photographs of the 'pavement' they were driving on, these observations hadn't really occurred to anyone else on their way to pick up fast food or to buy sweatshop jeans.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader