Willem de Kooning. Late Paintings

On 4 July 2006 an exhibition opened in the Nicholas Hall featuring paintings by a Dutch-born American artist, Willem de Kooning. The exhibition coincides with this year's homage to Rembrandt on the 400th anniversary of his birth

The exhibition features more than 20 works dating from the period 1981-1988, including a triptych from 1985 which de Kooning painted for St Peter's Church in New York. These late canvases by the celebrated American artist were done in his studio on Long Island, USA.

The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage together with the Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York, with support from Access Industries, the ACE Group of Companies, the Lehrman Institute and the American Friends of the State Hermitage Museum. The exhibition also displays canvases by Willem de Kooning coming from private collections in the USA and Switzerland.

During this period, when Willem de Kooning was nearly 80 years old, he became interested in the work of Henri Matisse and this showed itself in the simplicity of his late works and in the colors he chose to use.

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam. Beginning in 1936, de Kooning was busy only with painting, and in 1948 he organized his first one-man show in New York. During that year the Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased its first work by him. In 1964 U.S. President Lyndon Johnson awarded de Kooning the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian award, and in 1979 de Kooning became a knight of the Dutch Order of Orange-Nassau. The artist became a U.S. citizen in 1962.

The curator of the exhibition Willem de Kooning. Late Paintings is Julie Sylvester, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, State Hermitage Museum. This is her third project as curator in the museum. Her previous Hermitage exhibitions Louise Bourgeois (2001) and Cy Twombly (2003) were very successful.

A scholarly illustrated catalogue to the exhibition has been published by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich with support from the Gagosian Gallery, New York. The catalogue has an introductory article by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, and an article by Julie Sylvester. The text of the catalogue was written by the English art critic David Sylvester.

When the exhibition closes in the State Hermitage, it will move to the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome.

More

John Silbermann, President of Willem de Kooning Foundatiom

At the opening ceremony of the exhibition

At the exhibition

The exhibition catalogue