Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was born April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. His parents divorced when he was young, and at twelve he was apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and decorators while taking evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, where he trained for roughly eight years. In 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States and settled in New York, where he met Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham and absorbed the European modernism that would shape his work.

Through the 1930s he worked commercially and briefly on the WPA Federal Art Project. His first solo show, black-and-white enamel compositions at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948, established him among the emerging New York School. He married the painter Elaine Fried in 1943. In the early 1950s he made the work that defined him: the Woman series, ferocious figurative canvases shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953, which caused a sensation precisely because they reintroduced the figure while his peers were going fully abstract.

De Kooning moved fluidly between figuration and abstraction for the rest of his career, producing gestural abstract landscapes through the 1960s and 1970s and, late in life, a series of spare, ribbon-like canvases that the market now prizes. He settled in East Hampton on Long Island, where he continued to paint into the late 1980s as he developed dementia. He died there on March 19, 1997.

De Kooning's place in the canon is secure, but it was argued over at almost every stage. The Woman series of the early 1950s split the criticism that defined Abstract Expressionism: Harold Rosenberg, whose idea of painting as an "action" fit de Kooning's relentless reworking of the canvas, championed the return of the figure, while Clement Greenberg, who favored pure abstraction, withdrew his support. The paintings themselves have drawn sustained feminist scrutiny, most pointedly in Carol Duncan's essay "The MoMA's Hot Mamas," which read the distorted figures as an assertion of control over the female body. The other long-running debate concerns the late work made as he developed dementia, with some critics, and the curator John Elderfield in the 2011 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, defending the spare ribbon paintings as deliberate, and others questioning how much was the artist's own hand. What no side disputes is his standing among the two or three central figures of the New York School.

De Kooning's market has two tiers that should not be confused. At the top sit private sales: David Geffen reportedly sold Interchange (1955) for around USD 300 million in 2015 and Woman III for USD 137.5 million in 2006, figures that rank among the highest ever paid for any painting. Those were private transactions, not auction results. The artist's public auction record is Untitled XXV (1977), which sold for USD 66,327,500 at Christie's New York in November 2016, a result that itself surpassed the USD 32.1 million paid for Untitled VIII at Christie's in 2013.

Period drives value heavily. The 1950s Woman paintings and the luminous late-1970s abstractions occupy the top of the market, while drawings, prints, and lesser periods trade far lower. Demand is concentrated but durable, anchored by American institutions and a small set of major collectors, which is part of why the very best works tend to change hands privately rather than in the saleroom.

De Kooning carries an authentication challenge that buyers must plan around. There is no general catalogue raisonne for the paintings, the estate issues no certificates of authenticity, and the Willem de Kooning Foundation, while it maintains an extensive record of the work, does not authenticate. In the absence of a single authoritative register, provenance, exhibition history, and literature references do the work of verification, so documentation quality matters more here than for an artist with a closed catalogue. Period is the other decisive factor: a 1950s Woman canvas and a late drawing sit at opposite ends of the market. Finally, collectors should read the headline numbers carefully, since the most-quoted de Kooning prices are private sales, not auction comparables, and the achievable auction market sits well below them.