A Look at de Kooning’s Breakthrough Art at Princeton

Anchored by works from de Kooning’s first solo exhibition, held in 1948, including Black Friday—a highlight in Princeton’s collections—as well as paintings from more than a dozen museums and private collections, The Breakthrough Years is the first exhibition to focus on the enormously generative and creative period that surrounded de Kooning’s full-scale debut in the New York art world. During this time, de Kooning refined the exchange in his work between figuration and abstraction through experimentation, resulting in compositions that are among his most celebrated. The Breakthrough Years offers a rare opportunity to study a defining moment in the career of an artist who fundamentally redefined painting in the twentieth century to become one of modernism’s foundational representatives.