Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning made the Woman paintings when everyone around him had given up the figure, and was accused of betraying abstraction for it. He was born in Rotterdam, trained for eight years at the academy there in a thorough commercial-art discipline he never lost, and stowed away to the United States in 1926 with no English and no papers. He painted houses and did display work for a decade. The black-and-white abstractions of the late 1940s made his name; then between 1950 and 1953 he painted Woman I and its successors - grinning, savage, built up and scraped down over hundreds of sessions - and the critics who had championed him as an Abstract Expressionist treated it as apostasy. He worked wet into wet with an oil-and-water medium of his own so the paint stayed movable for days, and he kept scraping: the surfaces are records of what was removed. He gave Rauschenberg a drawing in 1953 knowing it would be erased, choosing one he would miss. Alcoholism damaged his later decades and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the 1980s, yet went on producing thin, lyrical late canvases whose authorship has been argued about since. Excavation, painted in 1950, is in Chicago and is usually taken as the summit of the abstract work. He moved permanently to Springs on Long Island in 1963, into a studio he designed himself with north light. Woman I took him two years and he threw it out at one point; the critic Meyer Schapiro asked to see it and talked him into finishing it. His wife Elaine, herself a painter, returned in 1978 to manage his drinking and his affairs. The late paintings of 1981 to 1987 have been the subject of a long argument about how much a painter with dementia can be said to author.

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