Willem de Kooning

By way of this gift, the generous donor Mrs. IJ.S.W. de Wilde-Reinhold wished to express her appreciation of the museum in Tilburg. Her husband, the former director of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum Edy de Wilde who died in 2005, served on De Pont's board for more than ten years, as of the museum's founding in 1989. Both Mrs. De Wilde-Reinhold and her husband had a strong connection with the newly established museum, and she particularly values the ongoing interest that De Pont shows for painting. With the work by De Kooning, the museum will be able to provide this with greater depth and character.

At the age of twenty-two De Kooning emigrated to the United States, where he would become one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. While his themes - women, landscape and a merging of the two - remained essentially unchanged, he continued to seek new painterly solutions. In order to translate his sensory and emotional experiences into paintings that could be described as a cross between abstraction and figuration, he worked on the basis of intuition, having no fixed notion of a final result in mind. The strength of his paintings lies in the chemistry between the artist and the work as it takes shape. The actual act of painting was rapid and brief; continually interrupted by long periods of observation that would allow the next step to be elicited, as it were, from the painting itself.