Spirit And Being

The 20th century witnessed dramatic changes in human life. The two world wars have left people with grave calamities and endless pain. Europe's supremacy in the world was challenged, and the United States emerged to become the new source of world power. The 20th century was also an era of new development. In the art field, classic style was replaced by modernism, which was again replaced by post-modernism. De Kooning lived his life throughout the 20th century either in Europe or in America, and he saw or experienced too many social changes.His artwork, which was just a reflection of his true life, was versatile in genre and lingered between figurative and abstract expressions. He was born in Netherlands and was educated by European academic art schools, for which he was rare among American abstract expressionism painters with a kind of "Europe temperament". De Kooning spent his adult life in America, and he was influenced by various American thoughts, notably the Psychoanalysis and Existentialism. The automatism creation of Surrealism from Freud unconscious theories stimulated De Kooning's "automatic" lines. After the WWII, Existentialism became popular in the United States as it advocated individual value and its humanism element provided Americans with guidance and recognition. Under the influence of Exitentialism, De Kooning argued that art equates life, and life is based on people. Thus, his artworks conveyed a strong sense of "being" to reflect the state of modern people and the crisis in the American society. De Kooning was haunted by diseases in his last years, but he still created many completely abstract works in a half-consciousness condition. His art life reached a new peak even if his physical life was fading.The paper will study De Kooning's painting of Women series to read into his genre, schema and symbolism. And the paper will try to explore the spiritual world of De Kooning by analyzing the "being" sense reflected in his works and by studying the social and real life contexts of the works, and to point that his painting reflects the resistance and the submission to eros as well as the living desire and the death instinct under libido action.