Town Square

Willem de Kooning

1948

Oil on paper mounted on Masonite

Seattle Art Museum

De Kooning’s remarkable journey began as a stowaway from the Netherlands on a British freighter in 1922. Trained as a painter, he immersed himself in the burgeoning scene of young artists in New York and became one of its most important innovators. “Of all movements I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection—a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practice his intuition.” His negotiation with the splintered shapes and shallow perspective pioneered in Cubist painting and collage in 1910-12 is evident in Town Square, where an accumulation of biomorphic shapes leads into ab