Willem de Kooning, Woman, I (from MoMA)
About this video
A narrator at MoMA introduces Willem de Kooning's "Woman I," one of six large paintings of single women from the 1950s. The fierce, toothy figure breaks with centuries of idealized female subjects, marks de Kooning's return to the figure after acclaimed abstract work, and its battlefield-like surface records a year and a half of painting, scraping and sanding.
You'll be able to
- describe how Woman I differs from traditional paintings of women.
- explain why de Kooning's return to the figure was a challenge.
- explain how the painting's surface shows his long struggle.
Key words
- figure
- A human body depicted in art.
- muse
- A person, often a woman, who inspires an artist; traditionally shown as idealized.
- abstract
- Not depicting recognizable things, focusing on color, line and form.
- critical acclaim
- Praise from critics and experts.
Transcript
- [Narrator] This painting is called Woman I, and it has the number after it because ultimately there were six such large-scale paintings of single women that de Kooning worked on in the 1950s. The woman of the painting is staring out at the viewer with a kind of ferocity and a kind of toothy glare that makes her anything but a typical seductress or muse that one might think of in terms of the hundreds of years of paintings of female subjects.
This is a painting that he began after having worked in an abstract mode over the last few years and having received very wonderful critical acclaim for the abstract paintings he made. He had, however, been painting the figure, and particularly the female figure, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and at this time he decided to go back to it.
And so de Kooning's big challenge was how to use the power of paint to again give some meaning to creating the image of a human figure on a canvas. And if what you see on the canvas before you has the feel or the look of something like a battlefield, there's a good reason.
Because, indeed, this is a picture that de Kooning struggled and struggled with. He worked for months and months over a year and a half, making paintings, one on top of the other, scratching them, sanding them down, getting rid of the image that he had worked on the day before.
The look of it is very much of something in progress, something that has not come to some kind of comfortable resolution or conclusion, but something which is still in a bit of a state of war.
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