A biographer's view of de Kooning's work

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“Black Friday,” a 1948 work by Willem de Kooning in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum, is on display as part of a major retrospective of the artist’s career, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through Jan. 9. In an essay at PAW Online, author and critic Annalyn Swan ’73 provides a biographer’s view of the exhibition after she and her husband and co-biographer, Mark Stevens ’73, were “mostly kept at one remove from the work” during the decade they spent researching their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “de Kooning: An American Master.” The exhibition shows “Black Friday,” a 1976 gift to the museum from H. Gates Lloyd ’23 and his wife, to be “one of the defining paintings of 20th century American art,” Swan writes.