Art by Willem de Kooning

De Kooning emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States as a stowaway on a British freighter in 1926 and lived without legal immigration status for years while building what became a central career in American Abstract Expressionism. His "Woman" series, aggressive, almost violent paintings of a distorted female figure with a wide, toothy grin, drew real controversy for how far it seemed to push hostility toward its subject, a reading de Kooning himself pushed back against without ever fully resolving the debate. Late in life, well into dementia, he kept painting, work that's been both defended as a genuine late flowering and questioned for how much of it reflects deliberate artistic choice versus cognitive decline, a dispute that's never been fully settled. He was married to painter Elaine de Kooning.