Two years, fifty times over, given up for lost

The making of Woman I became legendary, and the legend is mostly true. De Kooning worked the canvas from 1950 into the summer of 1952, roughly two years, and he did not work it the way you would imagine a painting being made. He built the figure, scraped it off, painted over it, and built it again, over and over. MoMA’s own account of the picture describes the canvas being painted, effaced and repainted on the order of fifty times. That is the shape of it rather than an audited tally: a surface attacked and rebuilt dozens of times, so that the finished painting sits on top of a stack of destroyed earlier ones.

He worked from numerous preparatory studies, drawings and small works he made and remade as he went, restarting the figure repeatedly. (You will sometimes see a precise count attached to those studies; there is no reliable source for a number, so the word is simply “many.”) Charcoal came into it too, but as drawing: he drew and redrew the figure in charcoal directly on the canvas as he worked, an underdrawing that is part of his process rather than part of the finished medium. The catalog medium, MoMA’s exact line, is oil and metallic paint on canvas, the metallic paint a real, slightly industrial glint mixed into the surface.

Well into the second year, de Kooning gave up. He pulled the painting off its stretcher (the wooden frame a canvas is tacked onto) and set it aside, beaten, as a failure. After all that labor, the figure would not resolve, and he abandoned it.

What happened next is the famous part. The art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996; one of the most respected critics and scholars of the era, a man whose opinion carried real weight) came by the studio, looked at the abandoned canvas, and encouraged de Kooning to keep going. De Kooning went back to it and finished it. The critic Peter Schjeldahllater called that visit “history’s luckiest studio visit.” How much the visit actually changed his mind has been argued ever since, and exactly what was said is not on record; the bones are well documented, though: he gave the picture up, Schapiro came by, he came back and finished it. The painting that hangs in New York is the one he came back to.