Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997). Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US 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 came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, John Ferren, Nell Blaine, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart. De Kooning's retrospective held at MoMA in 2011-2012 made him one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. Plaque affixed on de Kooning's house of birth in Rotterdam, Netherlands Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced in 1907, and de Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother. He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of commercial artists. Until 1924 he attended evening classes in Rotterdam at the, now the Willem de Kooning Academie.In 1926, de Kooning traveled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at Newport News, Virginia. He intended to become an illustrator of pulp magazines; he recalled in 1969 that those American illustrators were the most inspiring artists to me! He stayed at the Dutch Seamen's Home in Hoboken, New Jersey, and found work as a house painter. In 1927, he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house painting and commercial art. De Kooning began painting in his free time, and in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were the American Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, whom de Kooning collectively called the Three Musketeers. Gorky, whom de Kooning first met at the home of Misha Reznikoff, became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence. Balcomb Greene said that de Kooning virtually worshipped Gorky; according to Aristodimos Kaldis, Gorky was de Kooning's master. De Kooning's drawing Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother, from about 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with Peter Busa in about 1936.abstr