Willem de Kooning's Rarely Seen Drawings Come Into Focus in Chicago Show | Artnet News

Willem de Kooning is widely known for energetic abstract paintings, but his drawings reveal another essential side of his practice. He admired classical artists such as Ingres and Rubens and was trained at the Rotterdam Academy, where he developed strong draftsmanship through copying casts and antiquities. After arriving in America in 1926, he already had exceptional drawing skills, demonstrated by early charcoal works that render light and form with photographic fidelity. He did not separate drawing from painting; charcoal and graphite marks sometimes fed into paintings and sometimes appeared directly on canvases. An upcoming exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago will present more than 200 works, alongside related media, to show drawing as the main focus of his process.

"Although the Dutchman would come to upend the traditions of painting, de Kooning was, in many ways, an artist with one foot in the old world. He admired the likes of Ingres and Rubens and had been schooled at the Rotterdam Academy in the early years of the 20th century. There, he'd been drilled in draftsmanship and had spent years copying from casts and antiquities just like the Old Masters before him."

"By the time he arrived in America in 1926 (as a stowaway aboard a British freighter), de Kooning was, in short, an exceptional draftsman. An early charcoal, Dish with Jugs (1919 to 1921), for example, renders the light and grooves of its subjects so faithfully it appears like a sepia photograph. The Dutchman didn't differentiate between drawing and painting: at times, drawings fed into paintings; at others, charcoal and graphite joined paint as marks upon the canvas."

"The AIC show, " Willem de Kooning Drawing," opens in June with more than 200 works to reveal how drawing was central to de Kooning's creative process. Here, his drawings will be gathered alongside a handful of paintings, sculptures, and prints-many of these pieces never having been exhibited together before."

"Just how much did de Kooning draw? More than 2,000 of his drawings survive - the number of lost drawings, Salatino says, is "remarkable." In a typical retrospective, drawings serve to explain or contextualize major paintings. At AIC, they're the main course, confounding boundarie"

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