New Exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum Showcases Willem de Kooning’s Most Celebrated Paintings
Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50, an exhibition of paintings from what is arguably the most critical period of the artist’s career, will be on view at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 15 to July 26, 2026.
Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 features eighteen works created during the five pivotal years surrounding de Kooning’s debut exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948, including Princeton’s Black Friday (1948). The result is an intimate examination of the experimentation that reveals the artist’s signature play between abstraction and figuration. By focusing on this pivotal moment, The Breakthrough Years offers compelling new insights into de Kooning’s role in the shaping of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School.
Bringing together paintings from more than a dozen museums and private collections, the exhibition provides fresh insights into the artist’s process as he traces, copies, and cuts his imagery to develop his paintings.
“Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 invites visitors to witness a pivotal moment in art history—the development of Abstract Expressionism at just the moment when the art world was re-centering itself in New York in the wake of World War II,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “Built around Princeton’s remarkable painting Black Friday, this is an exhibition I’ve wanted to do for fifteen years, centered on close looking, whose focus is theoretically tight but whose import is sweeping.”
This is the second solo exhibition devoted to de Kooning at the Museum, following 2016’s Willem de Kooning: Drawn and Painted. That exhibition examined de Kooning’s later years and was curated by John Elderfield, the Museum’s inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer (2015–19) and Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This new exhibition, organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, is co-curated by Elderfield along with Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and head, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, with Lee Colón, curatorial research associate, Princeton University Art Museum.
“By taking a focused look at this pivotal moment in de Kooning’s practice, visitors will discover the artist grappling with material, line, and color in ways that shaped the trajectory of his subsequent career and shifted the tide of modern painting,” notes exhibition co-curator John Elderfield.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue that addresses de Kooning’s artistic development during this period and includes the results of a material study analyzing Black Friday and related works.
Numerous public programs accompany the exhibition, including two panel discussions planned for Saturday, March 14, featuring the exhibition curators, one of de Kooning’s notable biographers, and the project manager of the forthcoming de Kooning catalogue raisonné. Attendees at these programs will have the opportunity to preview the exhibition alongside Museum members prior to its public opening the following day. Visit the exhibition website for a full list of related programming.
Exhibition Credits
Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 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 Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 is generously supported by The Willem de Kooning Foundation.
About the Princeton University Art Museum
With a collecting history that extends back to 1755, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading university art museums in the country, featuring collections that have grown to include more than 117,000 works of art ranging from ancient to contemporary art and spanning the globe. Committed to advancing Princeton’s teaching and research missions, the Art Museum also serves as an entry point to the University for visitors from around the world. Please visit the Museum’s website artmuseum.princeton.edu for digital access to the collections, a diverse portfolio of programs, and details on visiting.
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