and toast tomorrow morning

[Ray Heinrich]

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. (AP) -- Willem de Kooning, whose
swirls and slashes of color helped define abstract
expressionism and made him one of the 20th century's
greatest painters, died in his studio on Wednesday.

He was 92.

De Kooning's abstract expressionist works included
traces of the earlier surrealist movement and prefigured
Pop art. Along with Jackson Pollock, he led the group of
artists who helped New York replace Paris as the center
of the art world in the years after World War II.

``I don't paint to live, I live to paint,''

he said in his 80s.

``It's a nice thing to look forward to.''

De Kooning painted daily until the late 1980s, even after
being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

In 1989, after a bitter court fight, he was declared mentally
incompetent and control of his estate was given to his attorney
and his daughter, Lisa, who is his only survivor.

De Kooning's death came just two months after New York's Museum
of Modern Art opened an exhibit of his late paintings, entitled

``Objects of Desire.''

Among his meticulously composed canvases was his 1944

``Pink Lady,'' which brought

$3.63 million

at auction in 1987. Two years later his 1955 masterpiece

``Interchange'' sold for a stunning

$20.6 million.

Vintage works consistently sold for

over $1 million.

Born in Rotterdam, he was the son of a wine and beer distributor
and a barmaid. They divorced when he was 5 and his father got
custody, but his mother took him away by force -- a fact that critics
made much of in later years. He decided to emigrate to the United
States and, stowing away on a ship, ended up in Hoboken, N.J., in 1926.
He learned English while working as a house painter and commercial artist.
His first one-man show came in 1948 at age 44. When his canvas ``Excavation''
won the major prize at the Art Institute of Chicago's
1951 exhibition, it was viewed as a vindication for abstract
expressionism, the movement that stresses the depiction of emotion
through shapes and colors.

In the 1950s, de Kooning returned to the figure, stirring controversy over his
abandonment of pure abstraction. He worked for three years on ``Woman I,''
which was bought by the Museum of Modern Art.

De Kooning never considered the work finished, or even a success, but it
became the most frequently reproduced work of art of the 1950s, and other
``Woman'' paintings followed. ``Flesh,'' de Kooning once said, ``was the
reason why oil painting was invented.''

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his 1981 book, ``The Shock of the
New,'' called the ``Woman'' paintings ``the most memorable images of sexual
insecurity in American culture.'' Other critics saw echoes of
childhood difficulties with his mother.

In the late 1960s, de Kooning moved into a studio he designed in East Hampton,
an eastern Long Island hamlet.

De Kooning was married in 1943 to fellow painter Elaine Fried. They separated
later and when he was 52 he had daughter with Joan Ward.
But he never divorced Elaine and in 1978 she returned. She helped
him stop his heavy drinking and handled his affairs until her death
in 1989.

De Kooning was known for having difficulty declaring his paintings complete,
but his output increased in the 1980s, when he produced
more than 300 works. In a 1989 interview, Rose Slivka, an art critic
and old friend of de Kooning's, commented on his vitality. ``It's very
exciting to watch him paint,'' she said. ``As always, he brings his
whole body into it. ... It seems to flow out of his fingers, his way
of touching the canvas as if he were following the color lines, as if
he's feeling into a very deep part of his life.''

© Copyright 1997 The Associated Press