Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904. His parents were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather. His artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store.

In 1926, De Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway on a British freighter. He settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he managed to support himself as a house painter until moving to a studio in Manhattan in 1927. In 1929 he met the artist and critic John D. Graham, who would become an important supporter of his work. He met painter Arshile Gorky, who became one of his closest friends.

De Kooning won the Logan Medal of the arts and was employed by a work-relief program during a period of about two years. This provided the artist, who had been supporting himself during the early Depression by commercial jobs, with his first opportunity to devote all of his time to creative work.

As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s.

In 1938, De Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried and they married in 1943. During the 1940s and thereafter, he was increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and became recognized as one of its leaders. He had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948 and taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Yale School of Art.

In 1946, he turned to black and white household enamels (being too poor to buy artists' pigments) to paint a series of large abstractions. Out of these works in the period after his first show he developed complex, agitated abstractions which reintroduced color and seem to sum up the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years.

De Kooning had painted women regularly in the 1940s. But it was not until 1950 that he focussed on the subject of women exclusively.

His work caused a sensation, chiefly because his paintings were figurative when most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists were painting abstractly and also because of their 'loud' technique and representation. The aggressive brushwork and the use of high-key colors revealed a woman corresponding with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears.

From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, De Kooning entered a new phase of nearly pure abstractions more related to landscape and less to the human figure. These paintings bear broad brushstrokes and calligraphic tendencies. In 1963, De Kooning moved to Long Island, and returned to depicting women while also referencing the landscape.

Willem de Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He died on March 19, 1997.