Willem de Kooning’s Drawings Take the Lead at the Art Institute of Chicago
At the Art Institute of Chicago, a new exhibition is shifting attention to the medium that quietly underpinned one of modern art’s most restless careers. “Willem de Kooning Drawing” opens June 14 and runs through September 20, bringing more than 200 works into view and marking the artist’s first solo presentation at the museum since 1969.
The show is notable not only for its scale, but for its premise. Rather than treating drawing as a preparatory stage for painting, the exhibition presents it as central to Willem de Kooning’s practice. More than 2,000 of his drawings survive, and the installation gathers them with paintings, sculptures, and prints, many of which have rarely, if ever, been shown together.
That approach suits an artist who never kept drawing and painting in separate compartments. Born in the Netherlands, Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) was trained at the Rotterdam Academy, where he studied draftsmanship and copied casts and antiquities in the manner of the Old Masters. He arrived in the United States in 1926 as a stowaway aboard a British freighter, already an accomplished draftsman with a deep command of line and structure.
Among the works on view is “Dish with Jugs” (1919 to 1921), an early charcoal whose careful handling of light and surface gives it the clarity of a sepia photograph. Also included is “Two Women’s Torsos” (1952), a dense composition of pastel, charcoal, and graphite that the museum acquired in 1955. Created during the height of Abstract Expressionism, the work extends de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings into a more compressed, searching register.
The exhibition also traces his later experiments, including drawings made with his eyes closed. The practice, which had Surrealist precedents, allowed de Kooning to loosen the link between observation and gesture. As curator Kevin Salatino noted in a statement, de Kooning “continually innovated throughout his career,” drawing incessantly and blurring the line between drawing and painting in the process.
Organized in partnership with the Rijksmuseum, the exhibition will travel to Amsterdam in October. For Chicago audiences, it offers a rare chance to see how de Kooning’s draftsmanship shaped the force and instability of his larger achievement — and to reconsider drawing not as a supporting act, but as the engine of his art.
