Untitled

Born in Rotterdam, Willem de Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway on a freighter in 1926. He quickly made his way to New York, where he met Arshile Gorky, one of his closest friends. The artist’s first one-man show, held in a gallery in New York in 1948, featured black-and-white enamel compositions, to which the present example is related. By the 1950s, de Kooning was an acknowledged leader of Abstract Expressionism in America.