The picture MoMA found frightening, and bought

In 1953, the six Women went on the wall at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and they detonated. This was the show that launched the series publicly, and Woman I was the first and most famous of the six numbered canvases. It split the room: here was one of the most prominent of the Abstract Expressionists turning his back on pure abstraction and hanging up a row of ferocious grinning women. To the painters who had bet everything on non-objective art it looked like apostasy; to others it looked like the most alive painting in the city.

The Museum of Modern Art bought Woman I that same year. It did not buy it comfortably. The acquisition committee approved it only grudgingly, and left one of the franker notes in museum history: they found the picture quite frightening, but felt that it had intense vitality and liked the quality of the color. They were unsettled, and they bought it anyway, because it was undeniable. The credit line reads simply Purchase; the accession number is 478.1953; it has hung in MoMA ever since.

Ever since, the painting has carried a controversy that it has never quite resolved, and the fair thing is to lay out the sides rather than pick one. Later critics, feminist critics especially, read the snarling, devouring, more-than-life-size female as an act of misogyny, the woman as a thing torn apart by a male painter’s aggression. The art historian Carol Duncanmade the canonical version of that case in her 1989 essay “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas.” It is a serious reading and the picture invites it: the violence is real and it is aimed at a female body.

De Kooning himself was ambivalent, and resisted the verdict. He insisted the grin and the figure came partly out of humor, and partly out of the whole long image-history of women in art, “the idol, the Venus, the nude,” rather than out of hatred. He tied the grin to those ancient Mesopotamian idols, astonished at the forces of nature, not to any real woman he wanted to savage. Both of these are on the table at once, and the picture does not settle the question for you. It is genuinely a debate, not a solved case: a painting violent enough to read as an attack, made by a man who said it was an idol and a joke, hanging in a museum that admitted it was frightening and bought it anyway. The fact that it can hold all of that at once is a large part of why it never lets you go.