WITH the death of William (or Willem, as he was christened) de Kooning in his 97th year, the last of the great abstract expressionist generation, the so called action painters, is gone and the golden era of the New York School passes into history. Its other great figures, Pollock, Rothko, Kline, Gottlieb et alii, had all gone before him.
It was an open secret that for at least a decade de Kooning had been a victim of Alzheimer's Disease and that his very late pictures did his considerable reputation no good at all. In fact, his standing has dipped slightly in recent years and the big retrospective seen in London and other centres a few years ago brought mixed reactions.
Some critics even felt that the energy had leaked steadily from his once potent brush and that it was in the 1950s - a crucial decade for art - that he reached his peak creatively.
Like so many of the New York School, de Kooning was not a native American. He was born in Rotterdam in 1904, where he served his apprenticeship to commercial art, attended the local art academy, and also went to art classes in Brussels and Antwerp.
After absorbing the currents of the time, he headed for America and in 1927 in New York met the man who changed his whole outlook and career, Arshile Gorky. The Armenian born artist was the chief link between European avant gardism and the emerging American generation, and de Kooning became a disciple and pupil as well as his close friend.
During the 1930s and the Depression years de Kooning was employed by the enlightened Federal Arts Project sponsored by the Roosevelt administration. At this stage he was still heavily influenced by Picasso, his master Gorky, and surrealism. It was not until the late 1940s that his mature style began to emerge.
Big, bold abstract pictures, almost entirely black and white and executed in commercial enamel paints, caught the eye of the rising generation with their slashing brushwork, their bravura and their emotional fearlessness.
In the 1950s came his famous "Women" paintings which were virtual icons of his era, and he pushed this theme to an extent that the human figure virtually vanished and the canvases became a skilfully controlled riot of energised brushstrokes.
By the early 1960s he was world famous, imitated by painters all over the globe, and the advent of pop art and other new waves did not diminish his reputation.
In his later years de Kooning lived much of the time in The Hamptons area of Long Island, and nature - particularly the sea - entered more and more into his work. By now, museums and millionaire collectors everywhere either had acquired works of his, or were on the waiting list for them; he Was regarded worldwide as one of the three or four greatest living painters. It is truly tragic that his final years were corroded by mental disease and decay.
Personally, de Kooning was legend. His trim, overall clad figure and fine head were a regular sight in the famed Cedar Bar in New York in which many of the action painters drank, and where budding artists shyly hung about to watch their idols.
He was known as a heavy drinker, and reputedly he was a dedicated womaniser (his marriage seems not to have lasted long, though he remained friendly with his painter wife, Elaine) but de Kooning was above all a dedicated worker whom nothing could keep from long, solitary hours in his big studio.
Apart from his considerable stature per se, he holds a key place as one of the men who helped postwar American art to grow to its full strength and eventually make New York the art capital of the world.