Willem de Kooning

Born in Rotterdam in 1904, Willem de Kooning's journey to becoming one of the 20th century's most renowned artists was a transatlantic one. After an early apprenticeship in commercial art and evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, he stowed away on a freighter to the U.S. in 1926. Initially working as a house painter and commercial artist in New York, de Kooning soon found himself at the heart of the burgeoning modernist art scene,…