A Princeton University Art Museum show captures the urgent power of the iconic abstract expressionist’s 1945-50 breakthrough years
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rtist Willem de Kooning held his first solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in spring 1948, just shy of his 44th birthday. A smash success, the exhibition made his reputation, repositioning the artist and catapulting him to international renown by the early 1950s. By the decade’s end, many would consider him the world’s pre-eminent painter.
Princeton University Art Museum now offers a kind of revisiting of de Kooning’s transformative star-making show with Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, covering 1945-50. Featuring 18 paintings that reveal an artist feeling his way between figuration and abstraction, it shows de Kooning finding his own unique relationship with both styles. Although The Breakthrough Years does not feature the exact lineup of paintings from the Egan show, it does take audiences intimately into the artist’s creative life from that period.
“He wanted to wait until he really had a body of work that he felt good about,” said de Kooning expert and show co-curator John Elderfield, explaining why the painter waited so long to have his first solo show. “He came up with an exhibition that had about a dozen works.”
