Even if you have never heard of many of the cast of characters in de Kooning's life or fully appreciate his art, this is a story worth telling and one in this instance told quite well. Disappointing in only one respect: the authors clearly didn't bother to have someone with a familiarity of Dutch double-check the spellings of names; there are numerous inaccuracies that hopefully will be corrected in future editions. But none of that should keep people away from reading this remarkable odyssey of a man who never appears to have completely found a home in his life and yet left behind such a wealth of friends and work.

This is your book if you want to know about Willem de Kooning. The authors have done an exhaustive amount of work delving into his art and personal life, focusing especially on the many women who had close and sometimes strange relationships with the painter. I am not convinced that worldly people of great Art will be talking about de Kooning as a master in the same breath as they will, say, Picasso one hundred years from now, but he was certainly imporant to American art over the past sixty years.

While de Kooning's paintings speak for themselves, I left the book thinking that his not being in control of his use of either women or alcohol sadly diminished him.

Jackson Pollack told fellow painter Willem de Kooning, "You know more, but I feel more." That's the most concise biography you need to read of this controversial American painter.

Authors Stevens and Swan's thoroughly researched and massive tome (630 pages), is not an unbiased account of de Kooning. They allude to but do not directly confront de Kooning's commercial motives behind his art; whom Pollack and others sensed as a watchful man who "impressed (others) by the intensity of his ambition and his knowledge of the direction in which the world was moving."

Even in this very admiring biography, De Kooning comes across as a cold and calculating artist (think Jeff Koons), very aware of the sensation that provocative emotions splayed across a canvas would have on a repressed American culture of the 1950s. His gimlet-eyed approach to art was a deliberate attempt to create his own "grand style." Yet, de Kooning seemed less possessed than obsessed, and, as a result, his art often `feels' staged despite its visual intensity. That lack of emotional transparency was his greatest weakness and what ultimately made him an incomplete and frustrating genius.

The authors gloss over de Kooning's artistic machinations, earning their solidly researched work only three stars.

This superb biography of Willem de Kooning can be separated into several major themes. There's the classic immigrant success story shading into classic American tragedy. Young de Kooning flees a hardscrabble, emotionally difficult home life in Rotterdam by stowing away on a freighter bound for America. After years of poverty and struggle, his paintings attract critical, then commercial success. But in his triumph are the seeds of his downfall: the unresolved psychological issues that are the source of his creative genius are also the source of tremendous anxiety. As the clamor for fresh masterpieces increases, the pressure of mining the places of inner pain becomes unbearable. De Kooning becomes an alcoholic whose innumerable binge drunks would have killed someone who didn't possess his superhuman physical vitality.

The book is also an inside look at the history of modern American art. De Kooning was at center stage during its rise in the thirties and forties and its flowering in the fifties. His first mentor, Arshile Gorky, taught him what it meant to be a serious artist in America. We watch de Kooning trying to outrun the gigantic shadow of Picasso, culminating in paintings such as Excavation and the black-and-white series that achieved a brilliant synthesis of cubism and surrealism, the dominant art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. During the fifties, he and Jackson Pollock represented the opposing camps of American expressionism. During this period, de Kooning refused to abandon figurative drawing or attempts to integrate form into abstract compositions. This put him at odds with leading art critics (Clement Greenburg, for instance) who championed the historical necessity of moving away from figurative representation.

Finally, the authors spin a spellbinding psychological tale. Raised by an abusive, domineering mother and an emotionally absent father, de Kooning was both strongly attracted to women and deeply paranoid about their potential power over him. His fear of being trapped led him to always keep his options open, in art and in life. He never divorced his first wife, Elaine, even though they lived apart for over thirty years. He had a daughter (Lisa) with Joan Ward, and while he never totally abandoned them, he never settled in with them either. If Elaine and Joan were the rhythm section of his love life, he also worked with a large rotating cast of solo performers and backup singers. Although he could be a poster boy for bad male behavior - instances of irresponsibility, self-absorption, philandering, violence and booze-ups too numerous to catalog - his women were fanatically loyal to him. None of his lovers have many bad things to say about a man who, looked at from the outside, might be mistaken for a world-class misogynist.

All of these themes fuse in the authors' discussion of de Kooning's famous painting, Woman 1, still one of the most disturbing representations of the female form in all of art. By the late forties, after years of abject poverty, de Kooning's abstract works were achieving critical and commercial success. But instead of painting more of these works, de Kooning stopped what he was doing and started working in a completely new direction, on a figurative drawing of a woman. Instead of making money and garnering kudos, he spent almost three years on one painting. At one level, he was attempting to bring the history of art forward into expressionism. Using the goddess figures of ancient Mesopotamia as his starting point, he worked in cubist planes and surrealist imagery to create a terrifying modern goddess. For all its homage to the past, the work was also a deeply subjective expression of his love and fear of women, and beneath that, his desire for and need to escape from the suffocating embrace of his mother.

De Kooning refused to force easy or false solutions on this painting, reworking it again and again while art world fashion moved further away from what he was trying to do. This and other Woman paintings were never well-received when he first exhibited them. But they are the strongest representation of his refusal to resolve uncomfortable contradictions or play to the painting fashions of the day. His heroic irresolution, combined with masterful technique, give de Kooning's art a sustained tension and palpable aliveness.

Even though he drank destructively from his late forties on, de Kooning made credible paintings into his mid eighties. Alzheimer's disease clouded his mind, but a man acknowledged as one of the greatest draftsmen of the twentieth century didn't forget how to draw. An entire support infrastructure was set up to keep the old man pumping out paintings because each one could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He lasted until 93, outliving almost all of his contemporaries and many of his younger lovers. The last years were exhausting and depressing, and the authors seem spent by the time they finish chronicling them. After a brief description of the funeral, and a one paragraph summary, they sign off.

De Kooning was a protean figure. A giant of twentieth century art, he absorbed all of its major movements into his work. His outsized personality contained charm and demons enough for ten men. This book is smart about the art and smart about the man, and remarkably even-handed in the telling - the authors seem to deeply admire de Kooning while completely understanding his flaws as an artist and a man. At almost 700 pages it's a commitment for the reader, but it's so well written, and the life story is so fascinating, that it zips along. If you have any interest in American art, or the inner life of a great artist, treat yourself to this book.

De Kooning arrived in America from Holland as a stowaway in 1926. The rest is art history. This voluminous, multi-dimensional biography follows the trajectory of the life of this leading 20th-century artist from impoverished immigrant through Greenwich Village libertine and rising artist to his move to Long Island and his position at the pinnacle of the art world and eventual dementia-afflicted decline in his last years. Relating de Kooning's friendships with other artists, relationships with women, course in the lively, avant-garde New York City art world of mid-century, the development of his artistry, and his lasting influence on modern art, the biography reflects not only all facets of the artist's life, but also the art scene and a good deal of the society of the period. And it offers vignettes of many notable artists, critics, art gallery owners, and such. With regular quotes from de Kooning's writings and other documents, photographs of him at different times of his life and at work, and illustrations of works of art, including a 16-page section of works in color, Stevens and Swan's book imparts an incomparable, memorable picture of de Kooning. The reader comes to comprehend de Kooning as an individual and also the reasons for his unmistakable influence. Both authors are art critics connected with leading periodicals.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in artistic expression. It really captures the soul of the master.

What an amazing man, living in an amazing time. I was very moved by this biography, especially in the way in which de Kooning and his world come alive. The writing contains enough analysis to help connect the dots of the artist's life. And the book is rich in detail, especially about the art world in downtown New York from the 1930s on. I enjoyed reading some of the detailed descriptions of various New York venues.

One thing that struck me was how uniformly negative most of the reviews of de Kooning were. It seems as though he enjoyed a brief romance period with the critics early on, when his work was still entirely abstract. That was in 1950, after his work "Excavation." After that, the critics basically wrote him off, declaring that he was past his prime. There were, of course, some exceptions to this, including de Kooning himself.

It was also distressing to read in detail the gradual deterioration of the artist by alcohol and his destructive personal behavior. This was the only aspect of the book I had difficulty with, as at times I felt like a peeping tom, peering in on the lurid goings on in the de Kooning household. But I don't suppose there is any way to tell the story without telling that part of it. It is no big secret that many great artists, performers, poets, writers, etc., have had more than their fair share of demons to contend with, and this biography illuminates that point vividly.

The biography is extremely well written and the pages fall away with novelistic abandon. I did not feel weighed down by an over abundance of detail, but I also came away feeling very "satisfied" as a reader. Please go ahead and treat yourself to a powerful experience. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in artistic expression, in the process of creative expression and where it comes from, in the craftmanship and hard work that goes into his art, and in a fascinating period in history. The authors have captured a dynamic view into the soul of a master.

This book is fine if you are interested in the details of de Kooning. They are available here in copious and interesting detail. But the book lacks perspective in that it does not address the meaning of de Kooning or of modern art in general, which ought to be the starting point. If you trace the recent history of art from figuration to abstraction you begin to see modern artists merely throwing paint on a canvas in great liberal existential frustration. They killed God only to be reborn as neurotically befuddled and overwhelmed by the complexity, hypocrisy, and ambiguity of modern life. They don't know what life means or how to deal with it, but they are nevertheless egomaniacally certain that they should be the ones to define this brave new world for the rest us, with paint thrown on a canvas, no less. Sadly though they seem to have been born at a time when nothing new is needed. As a result, the "all new all the time" incoherent mayhem that modern art and liberalism creates for the world is not so different from what a baby creates in his diaper and then proudly and oh so earnestly offers to the world as new, which it is, in a sense. Pollock and de Kooning are the most famous examples of this reflection of modern life. Their personal lives reflect in every way that this is badly mistaken. It is undoubtedly, though, what the art world has come to, but it is also what history will come to regard as a mistake, or at best a respite from real art while artists learned to cope with modernity like real adults.