The woman has claws. She has fangs. She has what possibly are hooves. Her mouth is a snarling rictus, her eyes protrudingly oversized, unblinking orbs of wrath. Her breasts are huge and sloppy, asymmetrical planets on a fleshy collision course.
My dream girl.
Willem de Kooning’s famed “Woman I,” an Abstract Expressionist masterwork cooked up from 1950-52, is chafing at first blush. The woman before you is large; she not only wants to sit on you, she wants to chew you.
"Woman, I"
Rest. Into focus comes the familiar. She is hardly a beast. She’s just a lady, represented is slashing colors and cyclonic movement to fashion something different yet the same. Maybe what you’re not used to, but it’s all there; embedded in its radicalism is familiarity. I see a woman sitting down. Zaftig and a little gruesome, wearing that tooth-baring mask, but she’s just sitting there. In real life, she’d be utterly approachable.
De Kooning’s knockout “Women” series from the ‘50s is up for ogling at MOMA during its nearly 200-piece de Kooning retrospective. The numerous women are the highlights, and they run from oils, to pastel, charcoal and colored chalk on paper.
“Seated Woman” also stirs a flinch. But wait. This woman, all jumbled angles and piled-on flesh, is actually smiling. Her eyes are open and bright, star-like with long lashes, and her mouth is irrefutably a smile. She is, beyond the whorl of abstract flourishes, a babe.
"Seated Woman"
It’s noted that some of the women are conflations of elements of ancient fertility goddesses and ‘50s pin-up girls, and that looks about right. In abstract novelty, Picasso’s much earlier “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” of course springs to mind. Yet de Kooning’s nonetheless offer a different overall effect: They fairly seethe with provocative beauty and intimidating bite.
Typically, not all the critics dug it. These women were monsters born of misogyny and disgust with the second sex, etc. They were the artist’s painterly revenge, and so forth.
A speech at the 1954 Venice Biennale lambasted critics who found the artist’s representations of women “an appalling libel upon the good name of woman.”
The speaker, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, went on: “However one may feel about them … de Kooning’s Eves, Clytemnestras, Whores of Babylon, call them what you will, have a universality, an apocalyptic presence that is rare in the art of any time or any country.”
That’s one bubbly Whore of Babylon, never mind her two mouths and feral coloring, standing next to a bike and quite enjoying herself in de Kooning’s “Woman and Bicycle.” That’s all she’s doing. Getting ready to ride away. She’s beaming, and it’s infectious.
de Kooning: A Retrospective, MOMA, through Jan. 9.
