Going back to the figure on purpose

By 1950, Willem de Kooning (1904–1997; a Dutch-born painter who had jumped ship to New York as a young man and become a central figure of the New York School, the loose group of postwar American painters now lumped together as the Abstract Expressionists) was at the front of the most aggressive painting in the world. And the front of that painting had a rule. The rule was pure abstraction. Jackson Pollock was pouring and flinging house paint across canvases on the floor, building all-over webs of dripped line with no figure in them at all. Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were floating great soft rectangles and single vertical stripes of pure color, what later got called color-field painting. The recognizable human body was treated as the thing that serious modern painting had finally, triumphantly outgrown. To paint a person, frontally, sitting there, was to be a generation behind.

De Kooning broke the rule. He went back to the figure: a large, frontal, seated woman. Not as a study, not as a private exercise, but as the most ambitious picture he had ever attempted. To his peers and to many of the critics who championed the New York School, this looked close to a betrayal, a desertion of abstraction’s hard-won purity at the exact moment it was winning. The whole avant-garde had agreed the figure was dead. De Kooning sat one down in his studio and started painting her.

And he was not retreating to old-fashioned figure painting, the calm illusion of a body sitting in a believable room. He kept the whole violent, all-over, paint-flinging surface of the abstraction around him, and he used it on a woman. The figure and the action-painting were going to happen in the same strokes, at the same time, on the same canvas. That collision is the picture, and it cost him two years.