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Drawings by Willem de Kooning, the ‘last Old Master’, take centre stage in Chicago show

www.theartnewspaper.com · June 12, 2026 · 11:40

“I draw in paint,” Willem de Kooning (1904-97) once said, “and usually I don’t feel so much difference between drawing and painting.” A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, titled Willem de Kooning Drawing, will take inspiration from this dissolving of boundaries and bring together not only the artist’s drawings but also paintings, prints and even sculptures.

“The exhibition uses drawing as a concept rather than a theme,” says the curator Kevin Salatino. “It’s drawing as both a fact and an act, a noun and a verb—so there’s no colon in the title. Drawing is so fundamental to every discipline, including sculpture,” he says. Even the critic Clement Greenberg, famously a proponent of pure abstraction, and of de Kooning’s rival Jackson Pollock, praised the Dutch American artist for his exceptional drawing skills.

Salatino says he often calls de Kooning “the last Old Master”, continuing in the tradition of artists like Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer and Peter Paul Rubens. Salatino likes to point to both de Kooning’s little-known depictions of the crucifixion—“He had an interest in religious iconography, though he was not religious himself”—as well as his first surviving drawing, Dish with Jugs (around 1919-21). “It’s a charcoal still-life made over many hours and many months while de Kooning was a student at the Rotterdam Academy,” Salatino says. (The school was renamed in de Kooning’s honour in 1998.) “The drawing is so extraordinary that it almost looks like a photograph. It’s now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and the first work you see in the Chicago show,” Salatino adds.

The exhibition will include more than 200 works spanning seven decades, many on loan from collections around the world. “It’s remarkable how many of de Kooning’s works are still in private hands,” Salatino says; around half of the exhibition’s loans came from private collections and foundations. This includes the show’s other bookend, an untitled simple abstraction in blue from 1985. When viewing this piece alongside de Kooning’s student still-life, Salatino sees “remarkable similarities in terms of form and a continuity of incredible variety emphasised. The beginning and end of his career match up in such interesting ways. You can trace the same motifs and images through the ages.”

Between the two bookends will be a few of the artist’s most famous works—like the Art Institute’s own Excavation (1950) and Woman I (1950-52) from the Museum of Modern Art in New York—accompanied by rare pieces never before shown in public. “People will see a lot of drawings they’ve never seen before,” Salatino says, including an early series of caricatures, the aforementioned crucifixions, and drawings de Kooning created with his eyes closed.

Almost six years in the making, Willem de Kooning Drawing is the Art Institute’s first major exhibition of the artist’s work since 1969. This year marks the 100th anniversary of de Kooning’s arrival in the US, his adopted home, after the 22-year-old artist jumped on a freight ship and stowed away across the Atlantic. “De Kooning is an artist for our time,” Salatino says. “I think it has something to do with his incredible openness. The fluidity about him speaks to the present. He made as many images of men as of women, and often gender was nonspecific. He was also an illegal immigrant here for 36 years!” De Kooning finally became a US citizen in 1962.

After Chicago, many of the works in the exhibition will travel to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for the show Willem de Kooning at Work (9 October-17 January 2027). Salatino adds: “De Kooning would’ve been thrilled to be included in the same museum as the Old Masters.”

• Willem de Kooning Drawing, Art Institute of Chicago, 14 June-20 September

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