Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50
At critical moments over his roughly fifty-year career, the revolutionary American artist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) made transformative paintings that not only altered the direction of his own art but also were deeply influential on the art of his time. The most critical in this respect were the extraordinary works shown in the artist’s first solo exhibition, which opened at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York on April 12, 1948—twelve days before de Kooning’s forty-fourth birthday—a late date for an artist with an already growing reputation. Among these paintings was Black Friday (1948), which entered the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum fifty years ago, in 1976, as the gift of H. Gates Lloyd, Class of 1923, and Mrs. Lloyd in honor of the Class of 1923.
Featuring paintings that are now among the artist’s most celebrated, the Egan show quickly cemented de Kooning’s status as a leader among American avant-garde artists. The present exhibition, Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50, is focused on a selection of these works, while also addressing examples of those from 1945 to 1950 that led to and succeeded them. De Kooning’s development over these years belongs among the greatest short periods of radical change in modern art. Moreover, his invention throughout these years not only was continual—always underway, as, for example, Henri Matisse’s transformation of his art step-by-step from 1905 Fauvism to 1910 high decoration—but also was one of the few that was continuous—uninterrupted in time and sequence, comprising not the replacement of one style by another but an unbroken process of revising a personal vocabulary with ever more ambitious results.
Technical examination shows that some of de Kooning’s works started out as abstractions but ended up as figurative, and vice versa. Moreover, body parts in some figurative works differ little from difficult-to-describe passages in abstract works. In his review of the Egan exhibition, the art critic Clement Greenberg dubbed de Kooning “an outright ‘abstract’ painter.” By surrounding abstract with scare quotes, the critic conceded that paintings in the show could be called abstract only because they could not be said to be representational. Neither one nor the other, but both.
Or both separately, at the same time. Indeed, that is how de Kooning proceeded in the years prior to and during those under examination here, raising the question: How best to begin? Before doing so, however, we should bear in mind a far less noticed response to the Egan exhibition, by Art News critic Renée Arb, who observed: “His subject seems to be the crucial intensity of the creative process itself, which de Kooning has translated into a new and purely pictorial idiom.” According to Elaine de Kooning (née Fried), his wife since 1943, the artist would come to regard Arb’s review as “a prophetic statement about his work.” The current exhibition and its accompanying publication are based on the assumption that it is precisely from concentrated attention on a set of related objects made in a relatively short period that we come closest to understanding how crucial was the intensity of de Kooning’s creative process itself.
The original motivation for this exhibition—which Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums, and I have curated for Princeton—was to provide a context for the appreciation and understanding of Black Friday. One obvious approach would have been to try to assemble the ten to twelve works shown in the Egan exhibition. One of these works, however, Light in August (1946), has been sequestered for decades in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, while two others have recently changed hands into private collections unwilling to lend during the run of this exhibition. In any event, we pondered: Would an archival approach be the best way to understand the point de Kooning had reached by the time of the Egan exhibition or the options it opened for what came later? Reviewing the Egan show, Greenberg said that all the works in it were painted within the past year, but they vary in style, making one curious about what came before them as well as what they led to.
Mitra and I, soon joined by Curatorial Research Associate Lee Colón, therefore decided to plan a tightly focused exhibition with critical examples of de Kooning’s work from the half-decade of 1945 to 1950—some of those in the Egan show, together with examples from both earlier and later. We began with a sequence of around forty abstract compositions with allusive but not explicitly representational components. This sequence both began and concluded with extremely large paintings, which would have displaced too many others in the gallery designated for our exhibition. We had calculated that the space could hold up to twenty works, half the number under consideration. And so, we proceeded carefully. In 1990 the critic Klaus Kertess had introduced an exhibition of twenty of de Kooning’s works with the words “de Kooning’s restlessness, his eschewal of closure and style, make it all but impossible to gather a representative sampling of his work—almost as impossible as isolating a representative sample of ocean or sky.” Our aim was not to isolate a representative sample of his works, however, but to describe a development: from the mid-1940s, when the sequence we were plotting began, to 1950, when it ended, and when de Kooning began the notorious series of Woman paintings that ushered in a new chapter of his career.
The exhibition has three connected parts: The first comprises one oil-on-Masonite drawing and three paintings made in 1945–47, not in the Egan exhibition; the second, six paintings that were in that exhibition; and the third, six paintings and two drawings that show the options de Kooning explored after that exhibition, in the final two years of the decade.
The first part has two pairs of contrasting works. One pair juxtaposes a fluid, purely linear image with a dense, painterly one, showing the two compositional means that de Kooning would combine in subsequent works. A second pair juxtaposes two grotesque, abstracted interiors—one in full color, the other in black and white—that share the same composition because de Kooning had rotated one of these canvases, tracing the details of one onto the other.
The second part represents the variety of paintings that were in the Egan show: apparently the only one shown made in contrasts of red and green; Mailbox (1948) and another work composed of flat planes disposed on a white ground; a similar “white” painting with the word ART scrawled on the surface; and two of the large black-and-white compositions in the show, which got the most attention—Black Friday and MoMA’s Painting (1948), the Egan exhibition’s most abstract work.
The third part includes two more black-and-white paintings, one possibly made in the autumn of 1948, the other likely made early in 1949 and novel in its white wirelike lines seemingly inscribed on the black ground. A similar composition, with a red ground, Gansevoort Street (ca. 1949), may well have been made around the same time. The remaining works point to new directions: two abstractions made with areas of black paint on white paper, the positive and negative shapes that form on the surface appearing to shift in spatial position; and three small “white” paintings, including Town Square (1948), composed from units of a similar shape and size outlined in black and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle or tiling. At first sight entirely abstract, these illustrate de Kooning’s famous phrase, “Even abstract shapes must have a likeness.”
Because the exhibition does provide a highly concise account of its subject, we are grateful to the Museum’s editor Janet Rauscher for the proposal that it should be accompanied not by an exhibition catalogue but by a publication that would survey the sequence of de Kooning’s works over the second half of the 1940s. The result contains an essay by me that proceeds from a critic’s response to the Egan show and follows the development of his creative process over this period. An essay by Mitra Abbaspour examines the context against which this development occurred—notably, the debates on abstraction versus figuration, and on what comprises a specifically American art. These texts are accompanied by a new, detailed chronology of this period by Lee Colón and a contribution by conservators James Coddington and Bart Devolder on their study of Black Friday.
The exhibition and publication project have brought together three generations of art historians. Along with the conservators, we have considered the impact of this enormously generative and creative period within de Kooning’s practice, both at the time of the Egan exhibition and in the decades that followed, thereby seeking to elucidate the career of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists.
Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 will be on view March 15 to July 26, 2026.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated hardcover publication, 144 pages with 117 illustrations, retail $45.
The exhibition is made possible by leadership support from the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Curatorial Leadership Fund; the Fanzhi Foundation for Art and Education; the Frances E. and Elias Wolf, Class of 1920, Fund; Gagosian; Shelly and Tony Malkin; the Robert Lehman Foundation; and Tom and Mila Tuttle. Additional support is provided by Christie’s, Preston H. Haskell III, the Joseph L. Shulman Foundation Fund for Art Museum Publications, the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund, Mark W. Stevens and Annalyn Martha Swan, and contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.
The publication is generously supported by The Willem de Kooning Foundation.
