With typical existentialist panache, Francis Bacon coined the phrase “exhilarated despair,” an oxymoron that rings true for the life of Willem de Kooning, whom Bacon admired. His work runs the gamut of emotions and sensations (and it is certainly exhilarating). His life, marked by enormous hardship and misery, was lived in an exemplary spirit of freedom and style. The affirmative alliteration of Irving Stone’s popular biography of van Gogh applied equally to this tempest tossed flying Dutchman: “Lust for Life.”

The husband and wife team Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan – art critic and sometime music critic, respectively, of New York Magazine and Newsweek – labored for a decade to produce their monumental biography, “de Kooning: An American Master”(Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35) in time for the Abstract Expressionist’s centenary. Copiously researched and deftly crafted, it is not only a powerful, convincing portrait of an extraordinary individual but an insightful analysis of the 20th-century American art world. The intelligently paced descriptions of art are lush and perceptive, and while focused on biography, rarely egregious in their determinism.

But to sophisticated writers like Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan, anxious to avoid the cliches of the hungry and lonely artist – bolted away in his garret, struggling to find his muse, drinking himself silly, and womanizing with reckless disregard – de Kooning presents a problem. This often was his situation.

The personification of the romantic outsider, de Kooning endured a childhood of grinding poverty and parental neglect and remained forever haunted by his truly monstrous mother and his cold, absent father. In the quaint Dutch phrase, the boy was “introduced to the four corners of the room,” and even as a man in his 50s, he would have wild shouting matches with his mother on one of her rare visits to America.

Class, language and temperament frequently reduced de Kooning to the margins of society, despite earnest strivings to make it in the world. Even in success, alienation seemed his lot; it was success, rather than failure, that made him an alcoholic. But he was more than merely resilient through these tribulations, his biographers show, folding the deep ambivalences in his personality into an emotionally ambitious art that embraced ambiguity and irresolution as a high calling.

When de Kooning stowed away aboard the SS Shelley from his native Rotterdam in 1926, his ambitions were as a commercial, not a fine, artist. He showed prodigious talent for drawing as an apprentice at the firm responsible for many of the city’s finest Art Nouveau decorations. But he left in such a hurry he couldn’t bring his portfolio, or say farewell to his beloved older sister.

In Hoboken he found well-paid work as a house painter, and then as an advertising illustrator (though he made less money). The Depression hit a few years later, but was still doing well, able to splash out on a $700 record player. But he moved in artistically advanced circles, and was fuelled by a desire to be more than a Sunday painter.

In the 1930s, he was adopted by the “three musketeers”: Stuart Davis, John D. Graham, and his particular mentor, Arshile Gorky. Of diminutive stature, de Kooning was seen as the sidekick of the towering Armenian. He signed on to the WPA, working under Fernand Leger on an ill-fated mural project. Eventually the artist gave that up, too, so determined was he to be a full-time artist, uncompromised by paid work and bureaucracy.

Despite having little to show for it, de Kooning was revered in the Downtown coffee shop scene for his perceived integrity and avant-garde ideas. World War II brought the School of Paris to New York as glamorous exiles, but as his biographers demonstrate, this only served further to isolate the proletarian, bohemian de Kooning from success. Peggy Guggenheim, patron of the exiles, adopted his friend and rival Jack son Pollock as the cowboy genius when a homegrown Modernist was required.

De Kooning would frequently be a man caught between cultures, too attached to the conventions of easel painting and an ambition to extend the great figurative tradition of Rembrandt and Rubens to fit the mould of “American type” painting as defined by his amanuensis, Clement Greenberg. His gritty, urban, essentially body-bound art bucked the trend towards the mystical and the oceanic in such abstractionists as Pollock and Rothko.

The biographers are compassionate but unrelenting in their analysis of de Kooning’s relations with women and his descent into alcoholism. In both cases, ironically for so willful an “action painter,” passivity was the norm. A friend recommended a drop of whisky to alleviate heart palpitations, and he found the same cure worked for lethargy in the mornings. Through the Depression years, nickel cups of coffee and the occasional beer was all he drank.

As for women, he could never bring himself to divorce Elaine Fried, with whom he was only properly together for a few years (she would return to his life as caretaker during his dementia), even though the mother of his illegitimate daughter clung to the ideal of marriage and family stability. The tendency was for his great loves to overlap in painful, distended menages a trois.

Although there are occasional lapses in biographer taste – did we particularly need to know from a young black girlfriend that he was a noisy lover? – the kiss-and-tell aspect of this exhaustive study actually does tell us much about the man, as well as about changing patterns in the role of women in the art scene.

And sometimes we learn as much about his state of mind from his housekeeping as from his love life. A pioneer of loft living, in the 1930s he would scrub the space down weekly, like a Dutch sailor. In the next decade, when he was famous yet still too poor to take the subway to the Museum of Modern Art to show a curator photographs of his new work, he allowed his loft to descend into squalor.

Pervasively sad though this biography is, the portrait that emerges is of a compelling, handsome, winning, tender, determined man: After 600 pages we like our hero, and never more than when he himself identifies value in chaos. When a drunk chases a rolling quarter someone has thrown him through the swerving traffic, the artist remarks to his friends: “That’s my kind of space.”

Mr. Cohen is the chief galleries critic of The New York Sun.