The painter Tom Ferrara met Elaine De Kooning in 1976 in Maryland. Ferrara had been making sculptures that, she told him, “look like Bill’s sculptures.” Because Tom was also a painter, carpenter and cook, in 1979 Elaine asked if he would come to East Hampton on Long Island and become an assistant. Thus began a working relationship between Willem de Kooning, 75, and the 25-year-old Tom Ferrara. The next eight years were some of the most productive years of de Kooning’s career. In the 1980s, he completed hundreds of pictures. After Ferrara left to pursue his own painting career in 1987, de Kooning was mostly finished with painting, and died in 1997 at the age of 92, from complications of Alzheimer’s. “Bill knew his days were dwindling, and he was propelled,” Ferrara said of the years when he was de Kooning’s assistant. “He was not struggling. He wasn’t trying to prove anything. He just breathed them out.”
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At first, Ferrara made bookshelves and cooked his meals while living at Elaine’s house about a mile away. Soon he moved into de Kooning’s studio to help with organizing, stretching canvases and cataloguing the work. “When I first started with Bill, he was trying to quit drinking,” he told Observer. “Because of this struggle, he hadn’t painted much for a couple of years. But with Elaine’s help and mine, as well as the help of other friends and family, he was able to quit drinking.” He was then able to return with renewed focus to what........