The People & Things I Run Across: Willem de Kooning

From a piece on Timothy Leary in Wired:

Hints of a wilder past could be found in a glass case that displayed a few artifacts, including a 1960 letter from the beat poet Allen Ginsberg asking Leary if he could score some mescaline for the great abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

From a history of Norman Rockwell in Smithsonian Magazine:

“Square inch by square inch,” de Kooning announced in his accented English, “it’s better than Jackson!”

This is one of de Kooning's:

And I'd never even heard of him before today,....