Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning ( də KOO-ning, Dutch: [ˈʋɪləm də ˈkoːnɪŋ]; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried. In the years after World War II, De Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or "action painting", and was part of a group of artists that c…