Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am. She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all. Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy, and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature - powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor - yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate
Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint. The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by
Rudolph Burckhardt shows Woman I at various stages -- versions "no less compelling" according to
Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it. Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards - a betrayal of the avant garde because it was
representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman) was this: "
The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.
-- Mar Walker
