Posted by Anonymous on 2019/03/30 under Life Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American artist who was born in North Rotterdam on April 24, 1904. His father was Leendert de Kooning, and his mother was Cornelia Nobel. Throughout his childhood, he became closer to his mother after the divorce of his parents. In 1920 de Kooning became an assistant to Bernard Romein, art director at a large Rotterdam department store. Romein introduced him to the work of the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl group. De Kooning began to paint, although he apparently viewed the medium with a certain detachment, as he would note in retrospect in i960, "When we went to the academy [in Rotterdam, in the early 1920s] – doing painting, decorating, making a living – young artists were not interested in painting per se." Painting, in de Kooning's eyes, was something "for men with beards," that is, nineteenth-century greats, such as Cezanne and Monet. The idea of equipping himself with a palette and painting pictures seemed ridiculous and quite unmodern to him. During that period de Kooning pictured his future in the field of applied or commercial art. A career in decorative painting or design were the options he considered. His later decision to emigrate to the United States would be strongly influenced by this goal. As de Kooning would say years later, painters flocked to Paris, while "a modern person" was attracted to America. Despite envisioning a career in commercial art, de Kooning became deeply involved in painting. The ideas of the European avant-garde, foremost those of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Matisse and Pablo Picasso, would become an essential foundation for his own development. Picasso especially developed into a key source of inspiration for de Kooning's early work. Afterwards, he decided to migrate to the United States, in 1926. Soon after his arrival he found a job as a house painter in Hoboken, New Jersey. http://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkc83oxLum1qhvptfo1_500.jpg