Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
—Francis Bacon, in Essays (1625)

No American painter of his generation—the generation that gave us the New York School—has been the object of more adulation, imitation, interpretation, and sheer unbounded admiration than Willem de Kooning, whose work is currently the subject of an exhibition marking the artist’s ninetieth birthday.¹ None has enjoyed greater critical acclaim, either. Long before the public was given its first glimpse of his work, he won the support of artists and writers —among them, John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, and Fairfield Porter—who recognized his exceptional talent and accorded it a special esteem. In 1936, exactly a decade after de Kooning’s arrival in the United States as an immigrant from the Netherlands, Holger Cahill included a work of his in the exhibition “New Horizons in American Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, which had been founded in New York only seven years earlier. In 1942—the year he met Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp—de Kooning made his gallery debut in the company of Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso in an exhibition, “American and French Paintings,” organized by John Graham, and two years later Sidney Janis included the artist in his book Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. Which was not a bad start for an artist unknown to the public, unwritten about in the press, and without connections in the