ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM · WORK

Woman I

Willem de Kooning · 1952

A grinning, more-than-life-size woman with staring eyes and bared teeth, built and destroyed in the same slashing strokes as the pure abstraction all around her, painted and scraped off roughly fifty times over two years, given up for lost, and finished. The painting that refused to drop the human figure when everyone said it was dead.

The canvas

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Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1952. Oil and metallic paint on canvas. 6 ft 3 7/8 in × 4 ft 10 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, 1953

Look closer

Find these on the canvas above

The bared teeth / grin
Center of the face, the wide toothy smile splitting the head
The single most arresting feature: a broad toothy smile that hovers between a billboard’s cheerful American grin and a snarl. In the preparatory studies the mouth was literally a smile clipped from a magazine, a Camel cigarette “T-Zone” advertisement, and pasted on; in the finished canvas the mouth is painted, but it still carries that ad-smile source. De Kooning himself tied the grin to ancient idols rather than to a particular woman.
The huge staring eyes
Upper part of the face, two enormous fixed eyes aimed straight out at you
The eyes are oversized, frontal, and unblinking, fixed directly on the viewer. This is the “ferocious,” “frightening” stare the MoMA acquisition committee recoiled from. They are the part of the picture that makes the figure feel confrontational rather than posed, an idol staring you down rather than a sitter being observed.
The slashing brushstrokes
Everywhere, but read them where they cut across the shoulders, arms and background
The marks attack the canvas: fast, thick, drippy, scraped. They are the same gestural violence you would see in a purely abstract action painting of the moment, except here they are building a body. Paint is action, not description. The figure is assembled out of the same slashing energy de Kooning’s abstract peers used to leave the figure behind entirely.
The body dissolving into the background
Around the edges of the figure, where the woman meets the space around her
There is almost no stable edge between the figure and the room behind her. Arms, shoulders and ground bleed into one another, so the woman keeps coming together and falling apart as you look. Figure and ground are not separated; they are the same churning surface, which is exactly the point of the break.
The pink and ochre flesh tones
Across the body and limbs, the smeared warm pinks, ochres and reds
The body is built from insistently fleshly color, smeared pinks, ochres and reds rather than a neutral or abstract palette. De Kooning made the point that, in a moment when serious painting had gone abstract, painting a figure plainly “flesh-colored” had itself become the daring, almost transgressive choice.
The scraped, reworked surface
The whole surface, where thin drippy passages sit next to thick matte slabs and scraped-down areas
Years of painting-over leave the surface a record of its own history. Thin drippy passages sit beside thick matte slabs; scraped-down areas show ghosts of effaced earlier states. The picture carries the documented marks of being made and unmade roughly fifty times, so the surface is itself a record of two years of attack and repair.

The story · 5 chapters

~18 min total

New York · 1950

Going back to the figure on purpose

With Abstract Expressionism pushing toward total abstraction (Pollock’s drips, Rothko’s and Newman’s color fields), de Kooning does the unthinkable and paints a recognizable woman. To his peers it reads almost as a betrayal of abstraction’s hard-won purity.

The making

Two years, fifty times over, given up for lost

He paints, scrapes, effaces and repaints the figure on the order of fifty times across roughly two years, working from numerous studies, before pulling the canvas off the stretcher and abandoning it. A single studio visit, the standard account says, brings him back to finish it.

The canvas

The grin, the eyes, the flesh, the violence

The huge staring eyes, the bared toothy smile (echoing a mouth clipped from a cigarette ad in the studies), the massive body in smeared pinks and ochres, and the slashing brushstrokes that keep building the figure and tearing it apart at once.

The break

Figure and paint-violence, the same event

The woman is not drawn and then painted; she is made and unmade in the very same gestural strokes as the abstraction around her, so figure and ground become one violent action. The break is keeping the human image AND the radical action-painting surface, when the orthodoxy said you had to choose.

After

The picture MoMA found frightening, and bought

The six Women detonate at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953; MoMA buys this one that same year over reluctant trustees who called it frightening. Ever since it carries a debate (idol? pin-up? misogyny?) that de Kooning, ambivalent, never settled.

1950–52

Painted

~50×

Painted over

MoMA

Now at

Provenance

Every hand it passed through

1950–1953

Willem de Kooning (the artist)

New York

Worked on the canvas from 1950 into the summer of 1952, painting, scraping and repainting the figure on the order of fifty times, then abandoned and resumed it. First shown publicly in his Women exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1953.

1953

Sidney Janis Gallery

New York

Debuted with the rest of the Women series at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953, the show that launched the series publicly and detonated the New York art world.

1953–today

Purchase (museum acquisition)

Museum of Modern ArtMuseum

New York

Acquired by The Museum of Modern Art the same year, 1953, by purchase. The acquisition committee approved it only reluctantly, recording that it found the picture quite frightening but felt it had intense vitality and liked the quality of the color. Credit line: Purchase. Accession 478.1953. On view.