Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) was a Dutch painter and husband of Elaine de Kooning. De Kooning was born in 1904 to a working class family in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 1926 he emigrated to the United States by ship. During the Great Depression de Kooning worked for the Works Project Administration as a mural painter. He was an integral part of the movement known by the names the “action painting movement,” Abstract Expressionist movement and the New York School. He achieved widespread acclaim following his one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery.

The artist was featured in a number of solo exhibitions from 1948 to 1966, many in New York but also nationally and internationally. Specifically, he had fourteen separate exhibitions and even had two exhibitions per annum in the years 1953, 1964, and 1965. He was featured at the Egan Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Workshop Center, the Paul Kantor Gallery, the Hames Goodman Gallery, the Allan Stone Gallery, and the Smith College Museum of Art. Most of the exhibitions lasted for 3 weeks to one month. Most recent exhibition, De Kooning: Five Decades, took place in Mnuchin Gallery, New York City from 19 April till 15 June 2019.