Earlier this year, I toured the Frederick Weisman collection in Los Angeles’s Holmby Hills, where two very important works by Willem de Kooning are featured in the house’s former living room: Pink Angels, from 1945, and Dark Pond, from 1948. Those two works play pivotal roles in two exhibitions now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Princeton University Art Museum. When I saw the two de Koonings in L.A., I had no inkling that I would be seeing each again months later in a very different context.

I also had no indication that we would see a significant rise in the auction market for his work later in the year. So far in 2026, 56 de Kooning paintings and works on paper have sold for more than $77 million, the most for his auction market since the peak year of 2022, when $194 million was paid out for the abstract expressionist pioneer’s work. That year’s sales included three pieces from the artist’s estate, spanning different periods of a long and varied career, that brought in more than $58 million. There was also a rare, important, visually arresting collage—with thumbtacks still in place—that sold for almost $34 million.

The alchemy that translates major museum exhibitions into market increases is difficult to discern. It’s even harder to take advantage of. But an axiom of the business is that critical focus and collecting interact in strange and unpredictable ways that tend to drive a market forward. At the moment, demand for de Kooning’s work is rising even while his price level is staying put. (That’s a dynamic I discussed recently in another context.) But the question in the back of my mind is whether we’re seeing something that might help generate a new market theme around an undeniable giant of 20th century painting.

I broke up a recent drive back from the Great Plains with a stop in Chicago to see the new show, Willem de Kooning Drawing, that opened less than a month ago and will be up until mid-September. The detailed, almost forensic exhibition succeeds at casting the artist, whom banker-turned-art-dealer Robert Mnuchin used to refer to as the “chairman of the board,” in a new light while highlighting the museum’s holdings of his work—including the seminal painting Excavation from 1950. In a sense, the Art Institute of Chicago is reclaiming its special relationship with de Kooning by repositioning our understanding of his work and, to some extent, the abstract expressionism movement.

Willem de Kooning Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

By focusing on de Kooning’s training, tools, and process, the Chicago show makes the case that his own work—and, by extension, the output of his peers—was the product of planning, meticulous trial and error, and revision. In this show, we see de Kooning’s extraordinary draftsmanship, honed in the repetition and transposition of images, shapes, and gestures. But we also see the tools and his training. Born into a working-class family in Rotterdam, de Kooning apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists, eventually getting academic training at night. In the old-school training method, he learned draftsmanship through excruciatingly close work. Later, as a sign painter, he used tools like a liner brush to create a bold and steady line.

Willem de Kooning Drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

As an artist, de Kooning was endlessly experimenting and constantly adapting and saving images and ideas. I walked through Chicago’s show with curator Mel Becker Solomon, who showed me how de Kooning transferred shapes and gestures across different works. Throughout this complex show, de Kooning is portrayed as more cerebral and strategic than emotionally expressive. And that seems to have been a theme with the ab-ex guys: Their work might look spontaneous, but it was meticulously planned. This entire show, which spans de Kooning’s whole career—with many phases, fixations, and encounters with different materials—essayistically makes that very point.

In his 20s, de Kooning stowed away on a British freighter and jumped ship at Newport News, Virginia. He found work painting houses, then encountered enough success as a commercial artist to eventually devote his time to becoming a real painter. It was not until he was in his mid-40s, if you can believe it, that de Kooning decided to show his work. Even then, it’s not clear whether he did so of his own volition or because he was pushed into it, either in competition with Jackson Pollock or for the need for recognition beyond the coterie of artists with whom he spent the Depression arguing about art in Automats and bars.

Willem de Kooning, Gansevoort Street (1949). Photo: The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ARS/Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum

Whatever the impetus, de Kooning did finally show his work, at the Charles Egan gallery in 1948. That debut would lead to some sales and more shows. Eventually, de Kooning would become the advance party, leading the abstract expressionists into the forefront of American art and, not incidentally, helping to create a market for “modern,” or abstract, art in the United States.

Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945–50 at Princeton, which you can still catch if you get down there within the next three weeks, is a small, intense chamber lined with 18 of the pivotal works made around the time of that first gallery show. John Elderfield isn’t very much concerned with that first gallery show itself but with the period between 1945 and 1950. That’s when de Kooning made great strides in creating what Elderfield calls one of “the greatest short periods of radical change in modern art.” Using many of the techniques that he learned from his training and experience as a commercial artist, including those liner brushes, de Kooning created an abstract art that was built out of a dialectic interaction between figuration, drawing, and abstraction. Taken together, we can begin to see the radical importance of abstract expressionism while also rediscovering de Kooning as an essential artist—all of which neatly frames for collectors his importance in the auction market.

I spent four days last week sailing from Bermuda back to New York. The first two days were rough, but the seas settled down to provide near-perfect conditions for the last 24 hours, after crossing the Gulf Stream before reaching New York Harbor. For me, it was great to unplug for four days and focus on nothing more than the wind, weather, and waves—not to mention numerous flying fish, a wide variety of seabirds, the barracuda we caught and released, and, finally, a pod of dolphins that leaped across the bow of our boat during that idyllic run home.

The sea life, as one of my shipmates likes to point out, is always out there whether we’re there to see it or not. Here’s something else you’re probably not aware of that’s always out there: Mylar balloons! In four different places across 600 miles of ocean, I came across a clutch of Mylar balloons that had probably been bought for a special occasion and drifted away from someone’s hand. I’ve seen this many times before on the ocean. Those balloons will be out there forever before eventually finding their way to one of the five great garbage gyres that besmirch our seas.

Please think about that the next time you celebrate a special event or decorate for one. Are those balloons really necessary? Think of the dolphins, please.

M