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He crossed many of art’s boundaries, spilling between abstraction and figuration over a period of 50 years-expressing a wide variety of moods-with no concern for the conventions of either conservative or radical taste. Of the painters who emerged in New York during the late 1940s and early ’50s-Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, among them-de Kooning, who died in 1997, remains the most difficult to capture: He is too vital, restless, jazzy, rude and unpredictable to fit into any one particular cup. “He just poured fast to fill it up, no matter what spilled out, and I said, ‘Boy, that’s America.’” What the hell did I want to go to America for?” A few days later, however, as de Kooning passed through a ferry and train terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey, he noticed a man at a counter pouring coffee for commuters by sloshing it into a line of cups. “What I saw was a sort of Holland,” he recalled in the 1960s. At first he found his new world disappointing. After his ship docked in Newport News, Virginia, he made his way north with some Dutch friends toward New York City. In 1926, Willem de Kooning, a penniless, 22-year-old commercial artist from the Netherlands, stowed away on a freighter bound for America. Among the artists who emerged in the 1950s and '60s, Willem de Kooning, shown here in 1953, defied categorization.