B. 1904-1997 - Artist Willem De Kooning was an abstract expressionist painter born in Rotterdam in the Nethelands in 1904. He attended the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and arrived in New York City in 1926. Willem De Kooning originally supported himself as a mural painter, and a house painter (pursuing his own art in the evenings) until he met his friends and mentors Arshile Gorky, Elaine DeKooning and John Graham. His first gallery exhibition was in 1942 at 38 years old, and his first one person show was not until 1948.

De Kooning came into prominence with regards to abstract impressionism in the late 1940?s after WWII. Later in his De Kooning's life he started making small scale sculpture, and stopped art altogether in 1986 when he was stricken with Alzheimers. De Kooning passed away in 1996, and left a legacy of some of the first distinctly American avant-garde works in the world.