Woman 1 de kooning

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam. the Netherlands.

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Biography [ edit ]

Willem de Kooning was born April 24, 1904, in the working class district of Rotterdam-Noord (North Rotterdam) to parents Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel. [ 1 ] His parents divorced on January 7, 1907, and de Kooning lived with his mother. [ 2 ] His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. [ 3 ] In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store. [ 4 ] He moved to the USA as a stowaway in 1926 aboard the British freighter SS Shelley. [ 5 ] De Kooning was one of the thirty-eight artists chosen from a general invitation to New York City metropolitan artists to design and paint the 105 public murals at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. [ 6 ] His fellow muralist, David Margolis later recounted their 1932 trips to the Savoy Ballroom and de Kooning's "keen interest in jazz." [ 7 ]

In 1938, probably under the influence of Arshile Gorky. de Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing . Man . and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy . As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man . along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels .

In 1938, de Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning. whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders into the mid-1950s, while notoriously stating: "It is disastrous to name ourselves." [ 4 ] In 1948, de Kooning had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51. In 1950, de Kooning was one of 17 prominent Abstract Expressionists and avant-garde artists to sign an open letter to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art accusing it of hostility towards “advanced art.” [ 8 ]

In 1959, de Kooning bought five acres of land off Springs’ Fireplace Road in East Hampton from the photographer and sculptor Wilfrid Zogbaum and began construction on what was then considered the largest artist’s studio built in the Hamptons. [ 9 ]

Woman, I

Willem de Kooning spent almost two years working intermittently on Woman, I . making numerous preliminary studies. He reworked the painting repeatedly, scratching the image, sanding it down, and painting over what he had worked on the day before. The hulking, wild-eyed subject draws upon an amalgam of female archetypes, from Paleolithic fertility goddesses to contemporary pin-up girls. Her stare and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning’s aggressive brushwork and frantic-looking paint application.

“Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented,” 1 de Kooning once said. Combining voluptuousness and menace, Woman, I might reflect the age-old cultural ambivalence about reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine. Others have critiqued de Kooning’s representation of women as ugly and crude, treating the female body as an object.

An artistic movement made up of American artists in the 1940s and 1950s, also known as the New York School, or more narrowly, action painting. Abstract Expressionism is usually characterized by large abstract painted canvases, although the movement also includes sculpture and other media.

European & American Art

The Netherlands 1904 – United States of America 1997

Woman V 1952-53 New York, United States of America

paintings, oil and charcoal on canvas

Technique: oil and charcoal on canvas

This painting’s impact comes from the apparent conflict between the violence of the brush marks and the subject of woman, between the slashing strokes and her big smile. Assessment has veered between Willem de Kooning’s own assurance that he was after ‘some of the enchantment and sunny charm of the All-American girl’, and condemnation from feminist critics for his viciousness and brutality.

Here is the turmoil of an artist who could leave nothing out. He put into the canvas everyone’s desire, frustration, conflict, pleasure and pain. He pursued inspired accidents of the brush, of which some worked and could stay, while others did not and had to be scraped out. It took him many months; he worked on the six canvases in the Woman series between 1950 and 1953.

De Kooning is proof that not all members of the New York School were Abstract Expressionists. Expressionist, yes, but he kept painting the figure, even if here she is defined within her indeterminate surroundings mainly by charcoal sketching. The truly luscious painted passages in the arms and shoulders are made by an artist who claimed that the glory of western art lies in its physicality, and that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010

From: Ron Radford (ed), Collection highlights: National Gallery of Australia . National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2008

Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio soon afterwards and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Woman III (Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art), Woman IV (Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City). During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton, de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on Woman I by the end of June, or possibly as late as November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time.

With this group of four paintings near completion, de Kooning began painting Woman V in the autumn of 1952. It was finished in time to be exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953. The autumn starting date for Woman V is supported by EA Carmean Jr, 'because like the winter Woman Vl [Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh] the palette of the picture is a shade darker than the previous works, and for both of them, none of the summer pastels seem directly related to their particular composition'. 1

When the six paintings on the theme of woman were exhibited together for the first time at the Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953 they caused consternation among many artists and critics who felt that de Kooning had betrayed the ideals of abstraction. But de Kooning's use of the image of woman was more than just a rejection of the radical prohibition on depictions of the figure; it linked and contrasted his work with an established tradition: 'The Women had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols …'. 2

De Kooning indicated that the Mesopotamian figurines on display at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, very much influenced him. The wide eyes, smiles, prominent breasts and tapering arms of these figures are echoed in the features of the women. 3 At the other end of the time spectrum the grinning mouths displayed by all the women in this series seem to derive from de Kooning's habit of cutting out the mouths of magazine pin-ups and attaching them to his work:

I cut out a lot of mouths. First of all I thought everything ought to have a mouth. Maybe it was like a pun. Maybe it's sexual. But whatever it is, I used to cut out a lot of mouths and then I painted those figures and then I put the mouth more or less in the place where it was supposed to be. It always turned out to be very beautiful and it helped me immensely to have this real thing. 4

Unlike Woman I and II . which depict a seated figure, the other paintings in this series show the figure in a standing pose. Woman V is also related to Woman IV and Woman Vl in that the figure is standing in what appears to be water. A blue field surrounds the legs of Woman IV and Woman Vl . and a transparent blue-green glaze covers the legs of Woman V . As Woman V is not informed by the summer pastels of Woman IV . another source has been suggested by Thomas B Hess in Rembrandt's painting A woman bathing in a stream (The National Gallery, London) of 1655. 5 Although the hands of Woman V are now clasped together at the waist, they were once arranged at each side in a gesture similar to that of the figure in Rembrandt's painting, who holds up her skirt to clear the water as she wades. De Kooning had not seen the picture himself, but it had been widely reproduced, appearing in an article published in Artnews in February 1952 about the cleaning of Old Master paintings at the National Gallery, London. At the time de Kooning was painting the Woman series he stated that they 'reminded me very much of my childhood being in Holland, near all that water. Nobody saw that particularly, except Joop Sanders. He started singing a little Dutch song. I said "Why do you sing that song?" Then he said: "Well it looks like she is sitting there." The song had to do with a brook'. 6

Michael Lloyd & Michael Desmond European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery 1992 p.256.

E. A. Carmean Jr, American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist . Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978 (exhibition catalogue), p.177.

Interview with de Kooning by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1960; excerpted by Thomas B. Hess in Wllem de Kooning, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968 (exhibition catalogue), p.148.

Sally Yard, in 'Willem de Kooning's Women' ( Arts Magazine . vol. 53, no. 3, November 1978, pp.96-100) draws attention to particular figurines displayed at the Metropolitan at this time. She further comments on similarities between the women (particularly Woman V ) and cycladic female figures familiar to de Kooning through reproductions in Cahiers d'Art and as a frontispiece to John Graham's System and Dialectics of Art . New York: Delphic Studios, 1937, p.100, n.22.

Interview with de Kooning by Sylvester, op. cit. p.148.

Thomas B. Hess, 'Four Pictures by de Kooning at Canberra', Art and Australia, vol. 14, nos 3 and 4 January-April 1977, pp.289-96.

Harold Rosenberg, 'Interview with de Kooning', Artnews . vol. 71, no. 5, September 1972, p.57.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010