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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Willem De Kooning
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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Willem De Kooning
WILLEM DE KOONING
Awarded by
President Lyndon B. Johnson
September 14, 1964
Artist and teacher, he has adventured into a new range of artistic vision and opened bold pathways to our experience of the world.
Biography
Painter Willem de Kooning died Wednesday, March 18, 1997 at his studio on Long Island, New York. He was 92 years old. De Kooning, who had Alzheimer's disease, was a giant of American art whose career in the United States began after he stowed away on a ship from his native Holland in 1926. He wound up in Manhattan a year later.
By the late 1940s, de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were helping transform New York City into the capital of the international art world with their expressive, freewheeling style that later became known as Abstract Expressionism. Pollock died in an automobile crash in 1956; but de Kooning continued to paint late into his long life, well after he developed Alzeimers disease. His career spanned six decades.
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Medal History
