Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, John Ferren, Nell Blaine, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart.

[3] In 1926, De Kooning traveled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at Newport News, Virginia.

Among them were the American Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, whom De Kooning collectively called the "Three Musketeers".

[6]: 98  Gorky, whom De Kooning first met at the home of Misha Reznikoff, became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence.

Starting in 1937, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have American citizenship, he began to work full-time as an artist, earning income from commissions and by giving lessons.

[3] That year De Kooning was assigned to a portion of the mural Medicine for the Hall of Pharmacy at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, which drew the attention of critics, the images themselves so completely new and distinct from the era of American realism.

This changed only when De Kooning met the younger painter Franz Kline, who was also working with the figurative style of American realism and had been drawn to monochrome.

[3][9] It was revealed that, toward the end of his life, De Kooning had begun to lose his memory in the late 1980s and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some time.

They painted in Willem's loft at 143 West 21st Street, and he was known for his harsh criticism of her work, "sternly requiring that she draw and redraw a figure or still life and insisting on fine, accurate, clear linear definition supported by precisely modulated shading.

[1] In the same years, De Kooning also painted a series of solitary male figures, either standing or seated, against undefined backgrounds; many of these are unfinished.

During this period he had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948 consisting largely of black-and-white works, although a few pieces have passages of bright color.

De Kooning's black paintings are important to the history of abstract expressionism owing to their densely impacted forms, their mixed media, and their technique.

[8]: 25 De Kooning painted women regularly in the early and late 1940s, but it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the female subject exclusively.

"From 1940 to the present, Woman has manifested herself in De Kooning's paintings and drawings as at once the focus of desire, frustration, inner conflict, pleasure, … and as posing problems of conception and handling as demanding as those of an engineer.

The Woman painting is considered as a significant work of art for the museum through its historical context about the post-World War II history and American feminist movement.

[18] In September 2015, Geffen sold De Kooning's oil painting Interchange to hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin for ca.

[8]: 126  Most recent exhibition, De Kooning: Five Decades, took place in the Mnuchin Gallery, New York City, from April 19 till June 15, 2019.