More than life-size, and staring at you
The painting is portrait orientation, taller than it is wide, about six feet four inches tall by four feet ten inches across (192.7 by 147.3 cm), so the woman is larger than life-size and looms over you. She is frontal, seated, and she fills the canvas. The first thing the picture does is confront you, not invite you.
The face is where everyone goes. Two things hit at once: the enormous staring eyes, fixed and frontal and aimed straight out at you, and below them the bared toothy grin, a wide smile splitting the head. The grin is the strangest thing in the picture. It reads, at first, like the broad cheerful smile off an advertisement, the kind of American billboard smile that sells you something. And that is not an accident of resemblance: in the preparatory studies, the mouth was a smile de Kooning literally clipped from a magazine, a glistening grin from a Camel cigarette “T-Zone” advertisement, and pasted onto the figure. In the finished canvas the mouth is painted rather than collaged, but it still carries that ad-smile in its bones. Cheerful pin-up and bared snarl, in the same set of teeth.
De Kooning’s own explanation of the grin reached past the billboard, all the way back to the ancient world:
“Maybe the grin. It’s rather like the Mesopotamian idols, you know. They always stand up straight looking to the sky with this smile, like they were just astonished about the forces of nature… That I was very conscious of.”
That is the key thing he said about her, from a 1960 interview (published in the little magazine Location in 1963). Not a portrait of a particular woman and not, by his own account, an attack on one: an idol, a frontal staring grinning figure out of the deep past, set down in the middle of modern New York.
Flesh, and the daring of painting it
The body is massive, frontal, built in smeared pinks, ochres and reds that make it insistently fleshly. De Kooning made a sharp point about that color. In the same interview he noted that it had once been daring to paint a figure red or blue, the way the early modernists shocked people, “I think now it is just as daring to make it flesh-colored.” (A more famous line (“flesh was the reason oil paint was invented”) floats around attached to him, though without a fixed source.) The flesh tones are the point either way: in a moment when serious painting had gone abstract, painting a body plainly as flesh was the transgressive move.
Slashing strokes, and a body that won’t hold still
How it is painted is where Woman I stops being a picture of a woman and becomes something stranger. The marks slash. They are fast, thick, drippy, scraped, the same gestural violence Pollock and the rest used for pure abstraction, here building a body instead of avoiding one. The edges give it away: there is almost no stable line between the figure and the space around her. Arms, shoulders and background bleed into one another, so the woman keeps coming together and falling apart as your eye moves. She is not sitting calmly inside a room; she is being made and unmade in the same churning paint as everything around her.
And the whole surface is a record of its own making. Thin drippy passages sit beside thick matte slabs; scraped-down areas show the ghosts of earlier states underneath; a metallic glint catches here and there. This is the visible residue of those two years, the painting and effacing and repainting roughly fifty times. The picture does not hide the violence it took to make it. It is the violence it took to make it.