Expansive Willem de Kooning Drawings Show Opens in Chicago

On Sunday, an expansive exhibition focused on Willem de Kooning’s drawings opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. The show includes some 200 artworks, including paintings, bronze sculptures, and mixed-media works from throughout de Kooning’s seven-decade career.

The earliest work in the show, Dish With Jugs (ca. 1919-21), was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by de Kooning. It is a black-and-white, almost photorealistic depiction of the three vessels on a wooden table. According to an interview with curator Kevin Salatino in the New York Times, de Kooning likely spent “something like 600 hours” completing the drawing over the course of several years. At the time, the Dutch artist (born in 1904) would have been a teenager, studying drawing at night at the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences in Rotterdam, while working for a design company during the day, painting signs, building furniture, and the like.

De Kooning immigrated to the United States in 1926, where he continued to work as a commercial artist, illustrator, and sign painter. He eventually attained mythic status in the midcentury New York art world, becoming a giant of Abstract Expressionism. While certainly best known for his innovative painting style, de Kooning continued to draw throughout his long career.

“William de Kooning Drawing” includes loans from museums and private collections worldwide. Some of the most intriguing examples are early sketches from just before the artist arrived in New York, showing snippets of street scenes like “five drunkards” standing one behind the other, with two figures towards the back holding up the man between them by his elbows; a security guard with a baton chasing a suspected thief from a savings bank; and a woman walking in a park with balloons, accompanied by two children with unexpectedly garish expressions on their faces.

Other, somewhat later works, like Woman’s Head (1942), and a portrait of his wife, Elaine de Kooning, from around the same time, show off de Kooning’s exquisite draftsmanship. Two dozen charcoal drawings from 1966, mostly female nudes, are surprisingly unfinished-looking at first, until you realize that they are from a limited-edition book of drawings de Kooning made with his eyes closed.

Below are a examples of several works from the show, a version of which travels to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam this fall.