It’s not news that the New York Abstract Expressionists were an anxiety-ridden, hard-drinking group of cantankerous guys, passionate about art and (for the most part) brutal to women. The rhetoric attached to this generation reinforces these notions; the literature is rife with such terms as “breakthrough” and “arena for action,” and a major study of the period is titled “The Triumph of American Painting.” Yet research reveals that much of the lore of cold-water Tenth Street studios and argumentative artists’ gatherings at the Cedar Bar and The Club is essentially true, even though the reality of this near-mythical era proves, not surprisingly, to be more interesting, more complicated, less glamorous, and also less squalid than legend holds. The most recent examination of these heady years is Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s biography, De Kooning: An American Master, a thorough, well-written, and even-handed account that is at once an unvarnished portrait of an individual and an informative study of the New York art world that he helped to shape and that shaped him.

It’s not news that the New York Abstract Expressionists were an anxiety-ridden, hard-drinking group of cantankerous guys, passionate about art and (for the most part) brutal to women.

The literal and metaphorical foundation of Stevens’s and Swan’s study is their reconstruction of Willem de Kooning’s little-known, wretched early years in Rotterdam, a period of familial neglect, violence, and grinding poverty. The authors conjure up the atmosphere of the port city as de Kooning might have known it as a boy—he was born in 1904—and piece together his dismal childhood. Art rescued him at twelve, when he was apprenticed to a leading firm of decorators at the suggestion of school teachers who noticed his ability to draw. The paternalistic directors of the firm noticed their young helper’s gifts, too, and sent him to art school. Without Stevens and Swan making any undue claims, they suggest correspondences between the teenage de Kooning’s mastery of Art Nouveau motifs and the whiplash drawing of his mature art, between his precocious skills, honed by traditional academic training, and his efforts to subvert his own facility—drawing with his eyes shut, for example—and between his Dutch origins and his avowed pleasure in the flat landscape and moist light of Long Island. The brutishness of de Kooning’s childhood, his appalling family, his flight from Dutch propriety to the unconventional parts of the port city, and more are sharply depicted. This evocation of the painter’s formative years reverberates through the rest of Stevens’s and Swan’s account, helping to explain (but not justify) the often less than admirable aspects of his behavior decades later: his doubt, his indecisiveness, his sense of being an outsider, his guardedness, his womanizing, his depression, his drinking.

The rest of the story is better known: how at twenty-two the restless young man stowed away on a freighter bound for America (abetted by a sympathetic Dutch friend) and jumped ship. How he supported himself as a commercial artist in Manhattan, how from the start he aspired to be a serious painter, and how, during the Depression, he connected with a polyglot community of ambitious young artists whose work, over the next decades, commanded international attention and made New York the center of adventurous, innovative abstraction—or something like that. The authors flesh out and add nuance to the tale. They describe in detail the milieu de Kooning tentatively entered in the late 1920s and fully inhabited by the 1930s and provide a wealth of information about whom he met and what he could have seen. By the 1930s, Stevens and Swan astute-ly note, “de Kooning knew how to be modern” and “knew how to be a painter,” but “he did not know how to be a modern painter.” What was required, they suggest, was for him to see “that an artist could invent himself, boldly and extravagantly, in the New World.”

Role models appeared in the form of an unlikely trio of slightly older artists, all committed modernists, whom de Kooning called “the three smartest guys on the scene: Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham. They knew I had my own eyes, but I wasn’t always looking in the right direction.” Davis was an all-American tough guy, equally devoted to his admiration of Cubism and jazz, who was forging a home-brewed, wholly original version of French vanguard painting. Graham and Gorky were, like de Kooning himself, immigrants—Gorky, a passionate, largely self-taught and -invented painter working to assimilate the innovations of the European vanguardists he most revered, and Graham, an immensely sophisticated painter, theorist, collector, advisor to collectors, showman, and sometime mystic, who was a source of the latest in-formation about advanced European art. Gorky proved to be the decisive connection to new ideas about what painting could be. He and de Kooning became especially close, as their achingly sensitive, extraordinarily delicate figurative work of the 1930s attests. Both were immensely adept draftsmen torn between exploiting and subverting their abilities; both struggled to develop imagery that embodied their double allegiance to classical skills and modern formal notions.

The nascent, precarious New York art world of the years of the Depression and World War II, and the volatile postwar era that followed, are nicely illuminated by Stevens and Swan. Through interviews with friends, colleagues, lovers, and acquaintances—plus informative quotations gleaned from general relentless probing—the authors make you feel privy to private conversations and the debates at artists’ gatherings, to be part of a world of hard work in the studio, haphaz-ard meetings, friendships, resentments, and complicated relationships, such as de Kooning’s life-long sense of equality and competition with Pollock. Yet given the obvious thoroughness of their research and the length of time expended on the project, there are some oddities. It’s startling, for example, that Stevens and Swan seem to have not consulted Irving Sandler, a participant and a reliable witness to the postwar years, and to have chiefly relied for information about Clement Greenberg’s relationship with de Kooning on a sloppy, error-riddled biography of the critic.

De Kooning’s anxious process is made palpable. We seem to witness his difficulty in resolving paintings, a struggle that, paradoxically, became visible as a celebration of the transitory that is often part of the strength of a “signature” de Kooning: the sense that an image represents a mo-mentary pause between previous states and future possibilities. We are made aware of his shifting notions of what a painting can be, of his changing aspirations, and of his evolving techniques. Sections of the book usually end with perceptive analyses of outstanding works chosen as emblematic of de Kooning’s concerns at the time. Not surprisingly, given the context, these discussions are often weighted towards the psychological, yet cumulatively they provide a capsule aesthetic history of the painter’s career. Again, not surprisingly—given de Kooning’s famously oblique statements, his elusive personality, and his primary allegiance, above all other things, to making art—he comes alive more vividly as an individual through the biography’s discussions of his work than in any other part of the book.

The authors chart the changing reception of de Kooning’s work, from steadily rising admiration to international adulation—not only by critics, curators, and collectors, but by just about every aspiring painter in America, who wanted to paint like him—to apparent eclipse by a younger generation. They document his discomfort with success and his flaunting of it, his dedication to his work and his unease, his friendships with colleagues, and his domestic complications. They trace his living and working arrangements, culminating in the great factory-studio he designed and built on Long Island. After the 1950s, however, it’s an increasingly discouraging story, punctuated by depression and a downward slide into binge drinking—“I’m not an alcoholic,” de Kooning told Sandler, “I just drink too much”—and the tragic last years of dementia. (For those of us who believe that de Kooning’s strongest work on canvas predates the ’50s—the drawings are another matter—it’s difficult to separate cause and effect.)

We are made aware of his shifting notions of what a painting can be, of his changing aspirations, and of his evolving techniques.

An image emerges of a notably self-absorbed man who wreaked havoc on the lives of people around him but still exacted devotion from them. The authors are elegantly dispassionate about all of this. They suggest Elaine de Kooning’s famous toughness and self-involvement, while managing a grudging admiration for her. Ruth Kligman, notorious for surviving the car crash that killed Pollock and for subsequently having a very public liaison with de Kooning, is allowed to demonstrate her innate silliness in her own words. Stevens and Swan treat de Kooning’s daughter and her mother with sympathy and delicacy. And they handle unsparingly the question of the distressingly empty paintings of de Kooning’s last years and the motives of those responsible for his care at the time he made them. De Kooning: An American Master is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of biographies of twentieth-century American artists. The illustrations are disappointing, and it doesn’t make you wish you had known de Kooning—but it enlarges your sense of the times in which he worked. That’s a lot.