It is easy to think of Willem De Kooning as the poster boy of modern art. So much of his life—the bohemian existence in Greenwich Village, the poverty, the womanizing, the alcoholism—fits the cliche of the turbulent artist struggling to reinvent himself and his art. Then there's the art itself: big, eruptive paintings filled with odd, often frightening images of women or landscapes or outright abstractions slashed with color that seems almost coughed onto the canvas. But as his adroit biographers Mark Stevens and Anna-lyn Swan take pains to show in "De Kooning: An American Master," this notion is a superficial take on a highly sophisticated artist for whom contradiction and ambiguity were twin grails that he sought to incorporate into every square inch of his art.
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