Figure and paint-violence, the same event

To see what Woman I broke, you have to see what the rule was in 1950. The leading edge of Abstract Expressionism had pushed toward total abstraction. Pollock’s all-over drip canvases had no figure in them at all; the color-field fields of Rothko and Newman were pure floating color and nothing else. The recognizable human figure was treated as the thing modern painting had finally outgrown, serious avant-garde painting was non-objective, meaning it depicted no thing, no person, no scene. The figure was, by common agreement, finished.

De Kooning refused to give up the figure, and then did something more radical than simply keeping it: he fused the figure with full gestural abstraction. The woman is not drawn first and painted second, a body set carefully inside an illusion of space. She is built and destroyed in the very same violent brush-marks as the abstraction around her, so that figure and ground, image and paint-action, become the same event. The female body turns into a site of paint-violence (scraped, repainted, smeared, half-dissolved) rather than a subject depicted sitting calmly in a believable room. The abstraction is not the background to the woman; the woman is the abstraction, given a face and teeth and eyes.

What this proved is the whole reason the picture matters. Gestural abstraction did not require abandoning the human image. You could keep the figure and keep the radical, all-over, action-painting surface; you did not have to choose. Woman I reopened the figure for a postwar avant-garde that had declared it dead, and it made de Kooning the great counter-argument to the idea that abstraction’s only honest endpoint was pure non-objectivity. Younger painters took the permission and ran with it: Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers built gestural figures in his wake, and the young Robert Rauschenberg answered him directly, talking de Kooning into handing over a drawing so he could rub it out and show the blank sheet as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), the era’s most famous tribute-by-attack. The gestural-figurative line he reopened runs straight on toward Pop art too: that grin was collaged from an advertisement, and an artist building a serious painting out of a clipped cigarette ad was, a few years early, doing exactly what Pop would soon make its whole program. The picture points backward to ancient idols and forward to the billboard at once. That double reach, refusing the orthodoxy of its own moment in both directions, is the break.