"De Kooning's friend and sometime mentor Arshile Gorky showed him technical and formal means to make eloquent spectacles of feeling with varieties of line. Other artists who come to mind, more by affinity than as even possible influences, tend to be rather isolated individuals: Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine, Giacometti, perhaps Henri MichauxBut de Kooning's drawings are not contained, let alone explained, by family resemblances.
When I attempt to conjure a historical and aesthetic context for these drawings, there stretches before me an endless vista of drawing per se, including peaks of da Vinci and Picasso and swamps of your and my doodles. I conclude that the actual and constant subject of this work is drawing as something that humans do. What happens when we draw? Why do we bother about it? What can it mean? After the early 1960s, de Kooning's hand seldom strayed from the ground zero of those homely mysteries."

(P. Schjeldahl, Willem de Kooning: Drawing and Sculpture, exh. cat., New York, 1991, p. 10).