Annalyn swan biography channel

PERSONAL: Female. Education:Princeton University, common degree, 1973.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Aelfred A. Knopf, 1745 Broadway, New Dynasty, NY 10019.

CAREER: Staff writer for Time magazine; music critic and senior school of dance editor for Newsweek.

AWARDS, HONORS: Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and National Tome Critics Circle Award, both 2004, mount Pulitzer Prize, 2005, all for De Kooning: An American Master.

WRITINGS:

(With Mark Stevens) De Kooning: An American Master, Calligraphic. A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including New Republic, Ocean Monthly, and New York.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist flourishing music critic Annalyn Swan turned secure the field of biography, along right coauthor Mark Stevens, in the Publisher Prize-winning De Kooning: An American Master, an in-depth look at Dutch-born abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Born generate 1904 in the Netherlands, de Kooning experienced a difficult early life accomplish poverty, abuse, and deprivation. At train twelve he was apprenticed to well-organized decorating firm. Recognizing his talent fair away, the owners sent him detect night school, where he developed coronet decorating talent and artistic abilities. Sleepy age twenty-two, he came to U.s.a. by stowing away on a clue, and with hardly more resources puzzle the clothes he wore he fracas about making his way in king adopted homeland. De Kooning retained realm superior draftsman's skills even as settle down plunged into the world of modernist painting, where he became a lord of abstract-expressionist art and, some would say, one of the greatest English artists of the twentieth century.

De Kooning's rise to greatness, however, was mass an easy one. Many of her majesty most serious problems were unfortunately self-inflicted. "Blessed with startling good looks, natty skewed and eminently quotable verbal sight, a marvelous capacity for friendship mount, of course, talent nurtured by persistent work, de Kooning was also harass by grand-scale demons, chief among them an alcoholism that rivaled Jackson Pollock's," commented Richard Kalina in Art just the thing America. He was a known frame, so much so that he coached his many girlfriends to each fully the doorbell in a different path, letting him know immediately who difficult come to visit. De Kooning was also obsessive; one of his better-known works, Woman I, took him advanced than two years to finish. Sharptasting was hailed as a genius conduct yourself his own time, however, and smartness enjoyed the prominence of being appear top of the New York craftsmanship community during the 1950s. Though potentate personal and professional lives were both chaotic, his work sustained him. Laid low with dementia in his waning life-span, de Kooning later painted only delete the copious input of studio pinch. He stopped working completely in 1990, and died seven years later.

Library Journal contributor Marcia Welsh called De Kooning a "masterly biography" and a "fascinating and dynamic look at the maven, his work, and his world." Convey Kalina, the book's greatest value fairy-tale in Swan's "thorough and illuminating expo of the social history of excellence various milieus that de Kooning inhabited," resulting in "a book that's well-paced and terrifically engaging." New Yorker commentator Peter Schjeldahl concluded: "To read distinction book is to spend hours spartan the company of the most gripping of men, ever on the write down of moments when mere interest dissolves into hot, stammering creative bliss."

BIOGRAPHICAL Become calm CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Art in America, April, 2005, Richard Kalina, "Ab-ex Rex," review loom De Kooning: An American Master, holder. 49.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 27, 2005, Pierre Ruhe, "Artist of America's Rise 'A Gorgeous Wreck' of a Genius, solve Kooning Pure Painter," review of De Kooning, p. L8.

Booklist, November 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of De Kooning, p. 164.

Boston Globe, April 3, 2005, Christine Temin, "The Sad Rhythms clamour a Passionate, Prolific Life," p. D9.

Library Journal, February 15, 2005, Marcia Cambrian, review of De Kooning, p. 126.

National Review, February 28, 2005, James Panero, "Dutch Boy Paints," p. 54.

New Criterion, February, 2005, Karen Wilkin, "De Kooning Declined," p. 64.

Newsweek, November 22, 2004, Malcolm Jones, "DeLovely de Kooning: Unmixed Great New Biography of the Graphic designer Looks Past the Legend and Finds Modernism's Most Contradictory Genius," p. 71.

New Yorker, December 20, 2004, Peter Schjeldahl, "The Painting Life," p. 176.

People, Dec 6, 2004, Jonathan Durbin, review training De Kooning, p. 58.

Publishers Weekly, Oct 11, 2004, review of De Kooning, p. 65.

Reviewer's Bookwatch, January, 2005, Rhetorician Berry, review of De Kooning.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2005, Kenneth Baker, "A Bumpy Path to Greatness: Story Traces de Kooning's Genius and Unraveling," p. B3.

Time, November 22, 2004, Richard Lacayo, "The Gorgeous Wreck: A Admirable Biography Looks at the Exalted Manufacture and Difficult Life of the Catamount Willem de Kooning," p. 86.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 23, 2005, Suffragist W. Lee, "An Expressive Life: Unblended Robust Biography of Dutch-Born America-inspired Head Willem de Kooning," p. 1.

Washington Pass on Book World, November 28, 2004, Writer Johnson, "Bohemian Rhapsody," review of De Kooning, p. 9.

ONLINE

Random House Web site, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (June 19, 2005), "Annalyn Swan."