Artists & Works

STYLE: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Willem de Kooning is one of the most well-known and respected artists of the twentieth century. He is a seminal figure, both in the field of abstract-expressionism, and as a benchmark of modernist expression for generations of artists to follow. His work is in the collection of most major museums of modern and contemporary art. Along with Jackson Pollock, he has become an icon of the abstract-expressionist movement.

De Kooning is perhaps best-known for his series of "women" paintings. The first series was started in 1938 and became a recurrent theme to which he would return again and again in his career. Though aggressively painted, with sweeping strokes and garish colors, the women paintings were always still recognizable as figures. So it is although on a much smaller scale--with this print, made sometime during the seventies. The energetic lines depict fleshy figures, suggesting, as the paintings did, an aggressive sexuality.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Linda Nochlin, Art in America, 11/98
What keeps process within bounds, keeps de Kooning's women from being mere painterly gush, is the memory of and the struggle with Cubism: the picture plane asserts itself in the most unexpected places and the painterly daring is always disciplined by the artist's struggle simultaneously to create and destroy the order of the Cubist grid.
Certainly, the subject "woman" is approached aggressively in de Kooning's series, and, in some areas, paint is applied violently as the most manifest form of that aggressive impulse. But in other places at other times, the point is clearly something else: some areas of the paint surface are almost rococo in their creamy suppleness, in the tenderness of their pastel harmonies and dissonances. Although the imagery retains its startling jolt, it is the delicacy and, yes, elegance of the facture that, after the passage of time, is most striking.
I am not sure I can agree with any single evaluation of the "Woman" series from the viewpoint of "positive" or "negative" gender representation. There is too much ambivalence here. And what, precisely, constitutes "positive" or "negative" when a cultural concept like "woman" (in general) is at stake? "Resoundingly affirmative?" "Fierce generosity?" "Predatory and rapacious?" or "An evil muse"? Frankly, I would go for the last, but with a considerable dose of humor added to the mix: I would like to appropriate the "Woman" series, with all its energy, its harsh rejection of conventional prettiness and its brilliant pictorial rhetoric, for a more inclusive and multivalent feminist critique of gender representation as a whole.