In 1926, De Kooning traveled to the U.S. as a
stowaway on the
Shelley, a British
freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at
Newport News, Virginia. He intended to become an illustrator of
pulp magazines; he recalled in 1969 that "those American illustrators were the most inspiring artists to me!" He stayed at the
Dutch Seamen's Home in
Hoboken, New Jersey, and found work as a house painter. In 1927, he moved to
Manhattan,
New York City, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house painting and commercial art. De Kooning began painting in his free time, and in 1928 he joined the
art colony at
Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the
modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were the American
Stuart Davis, the Armenian
Arshile Gorky and the Russian
John Graham, whom De Kooning collectively called the "Three Musketeers". 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.
Balcomb Greene said that "de Kooning virtually worshipped Gorky"; according to
Aristodimos Kaldis, "Gorky was de Kooning's master". De Kooning's drawing
Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother, from about 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with
Peter Busa in about 1936. De Kooning joined the
Artists Union in 1934, and in 1935 was employed in the
Federal Art Project of the
Works Progress Administration, for which he designed a number of murals including some for the
Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in
Brooklyn, New York City. None of them were executed, but a sketch for one was included in
New Horizons in American Art at the
Museum of Modern Art, his first group show. Starting in 1937, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have U.S. citizenship, he began to work full-time as an artist, earning income from commissions and by giving lessons. 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. De Kooning worked on his first series of
portrait paintings: standing or sedentary men like
Two Men Standing,
Man, and
Seated Figure (Classic Male), even combining with
self-portraits as with
Portrait with Imaginary Brother (1938–39). At this time, De Kooning's work borrowed strongly from Gorky's
surrealist imagery and was influenced by
Picasso. 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. Kline, who died young, was one of De Kooning's closest artist friends. Kline's influence is evident in De Kooning's
calligraphic black images of this period. During the late 1940s and early '50s, De Kooning joined other fellow contemporary artists including Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, in their struggle to break free from common artistic movements of the era including
Cubism, Surrealism, and
Regionalism. Their emotive gestures and abstract pieces were a result of their attempt to abandon the other movements. This movement was later called "Abstract Expressionism" a subdivision of which was sometimes known as "
Action Painting" and the "New York School". Between 1948 and 1953, De Kooning became more well known for his artistic techniques, but he tried not to repeat himself. In the late 1950s, De Kooning's work shifted away from the figurative work of the women (though he would return to that subject matter on occasion) and began to display an interest in more abstract, less representational imagery. , 1968) ==Work==