Willem de Kooning at MoMA

Untitled (The Cow Jumps Over the Moon), 1937–38
Born in 1904 in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, de Kooning was 24 when he arrived in New York as a stowaway aboard a British freighter. Well trained in both academic and commercial art, he soon found design work on stage sets and department store displays. But in the mid-1930s he decided to devote himself seriously to painting. Throughout his early years, he struggled to absorb new developments in European modernism, like the biomorphic forms and flat, brightly colored backgrounds he found in the work of Miro.

• Review: De Kooning at MoMA