In the fall of 1927, a twenty-three-year-old native of Rotterdam moved to Manhattan from the Dutch community in Hoboken, New Jersey. He had arrived in the United States as a stowaway the previous year. Highly trained as a traditional academic draftsman and as a commercial and decorative artist, he had already begun visiting New York galleries, fascinated by what he could see of modernism, and was already making paintings and drawings that reflected that fascination. A few years after moving to New York, he had the luck to meet three forward-looking painters whom he later described as the “three smartest guys on the scene: Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham. They knew I had my own eyes, but I wasn’t always looking in the right direction. I was certainly in need of a helping hand a times.” He referred to this close-knit trio of passionate modernists as the “three Musketeers” and enthusiastically joined them as a kind of d’Artagnan, becoming especially close to Gorky as he began to forge an individual pictorial language of his own.

The young Dutchman was, of course, Willem de Kooning (1904–97). The colorful tale of his illicit immigration and his early struggles is fairly familiar, thanks both to his towering reputation and the excellent biography De Kooning: An American Master, published by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in 2004. But say “de Kooning” and the immediate association is not with this formative period, but with the hard-drinking glory years of Abstract