拍品专文
As in Woman I, the painting that would catalyze Willem de Kooning's rise to fame, the harsh gestures and crude lines of Untitled (Woman) are an unsentimental rendering of art's most ancient subject. The nude had long held de Kooning's attention, a standard form he would return to over the course of his career, but while the artist had rendered it in various degrees of abstraction throughout the 1940's, by the early 1950s de Kooning's aim became obsessively focused on imbuing what representation remained of the figure with the brute life-force of expressionism.
But the self-imposed assignment was difficult on the artist, and the task took two years to complete. The photographs taken by friend Rudolph Burckhardt over the course of the creation of Woman I, from 1950-2, are a clue to de Kooning's labor. They show a continual erasing and rebuilding of horizontal and diagonal strokes, as de Kooning tirelessly sought to fulfill the self-imposed standard he held for the work. The black and white photos are not incidentally, striking in similarity to the drawing here, since de Kooning, for this painting in particular, used preparatory sketches to guide him. In Barbara Hess's careful study of de Kooning's life and working methods, she notes, "in contrast to his usual practice of developing the image directly on canvas, this time de Kooning made numerous preparatory sketches on paper and pasted them onto the canvas as an aid to working out certain elements. (B.Hess, Content as a Glimpse, New York, 2004, p. 35). What held over the course of those two years was the difficulty of abstracting form without sacrificing the archetypal structure of the essential feminine. "What preoccupied de Kooning most was the woman's facial expression, gaze, smile. The female figure on canvas, especially her face, seemed to resist the painterly process of abstraction," writes Hess (ibid, p.33).
It was only when the nude became less a subject than a compulsion, that de Kooning neared his goal. The artist would recall: "The women became compulsive...in the sense of not being able to get hold of it--it really is very funny to get stuck with a woman's knee for instance. You say, 'What the hell am I going to do now?'; it's really ridiculous. It may be that it fascinates me, that it isn't supposed to be done" (ibid. p.44 ).
Hess notes de Kooning's struggle with Woman I: "He planned, composed and rejected. In fact he was ready to write off Woman I as a complete failure and had removed the canvas from the stretchers when the American art historian Meyer Schapiro visited him in the studio in March 1952 and encouraged him to rework the image once again and finish it. After the 1953 Janis show, Woman I was acquired before the year was out by the Museum of Modern Art" (ibid p. 35).
The very germ of Woman I is contained in Untitled (Woman). The drawing, which pleased de Kooning enough to want to gift to his wife, fuses gestural sublimation with the perspectival rules of cubism to imbue unflinching lust through a primitive form, melding representation with the subconscious painting methodology of abstract expressionism. At the time of their making, Irving Sandler called the Women series "metaphors for [de Kooning's] own and modern man's existential condition," while a 1953 review by James Fitzsimmons in Art stated: "de Kooning was involved in a terrible struggle with a female force...a bloody hand to hand combat," with a "female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse and infantile in ourselves (ibid, p.33)."
For his part, de Kooning would ignore these psychological interpretations, and defended his contentious decision to treat the figure as such in and of itself: "Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the women, but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don't really feel like a non-objective painter at all. Today some artists feel they have to go back to the figure, and that word 'figure' becomes such a ridiculous omen--if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it" (ibid).
But the self-imposed assignment was difficult on the artist, and the task took two years to complete. The photographs taken by friend Rudolph Burckhardt over the course of the creation of Woman I, from 1950-2, are a clue to de Kooning's labor. They show a continual erasing and rebuilding of horizontal and diagonal strokes, as de Kooning tirelessly sought to fulfill the self-imposed standard he held for the work. The black and white photos are not incidentally, striking in similarity to the drawing here, since de Kooning, for this painting in particular, used preparatory sketches to guide him. In Barbara Hess's careful study of de Kooning's life and working methods, she notes, "in contrast to his usual practice of developing the image directly on canvas, this time de Kooning made numerous preparatory sketches on paper and pasted them onto the canvas as an aid to working out certain elements. (B.Hess, Content as a Glimpse, New York, 2004, p. 35). What held over the course of those two years was the difficulty of abstracting form without sacrificing the archetypal structure of the essential feminine. "What preoccupied de Kooning most was the woman's facial expression, gaze, smile. The female figure on canvas, especially her face, seemed to resist the painterly process of abstraction," writes Hess (ibid, p.33).
It was only when the nude became less a subject than a compulsion, that de Kooning neared his goal. The artist would recall: "The women became compulsive...in the sense of not being able to get hold of it--it really is very funny to get stuck with a woman's knee for instance. You say, 'What the hell am I going to do now?'; it's really ridiculous. It may be that it fascinates me, that it isn't supposed to be done" (ibid. p.44 ).
Hess notes de Kooning's struggle with Woman I: "He planned, composed and rejected. In fact he was ready to write off Woman I as a complete failure and had removed the canvas from the stretchers when the American art historian Meyer Schapiro visited him in the studio in March 1952 and encouraged him to rework the image once again and finish it. After the 1953 Janis show, Woman I was acquired before the year was out by the Museum of Modern Art" (ibid p. 35).
The very germ of Woman I is contained in Untitled (Woman). The drawing, which pleased de Kooning enough to want to gift to his wife, fuses gestural sublimation with the perspectival rules of cubism to imbue unflinching lust through a primitive form, melding representation with the subconscious painting methodology of abstract expressionism. At the time of their making, Irving Sandler called the Women series "metaphors for [de Kooning's] own and modern man's existential condition," while a 1953 review by James Fitzsimmons in Art stated: "de Kooning was involved in a terrible struggle with a female force...a bloody hand to hand combat," with a "female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse and infantile in ourselves (ibid, p.33)."
For his part, de Kooning would ignore these psychological interpretations, and defended his contentious decision to treat the figure as such in and of itself: "Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the women, but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don't really feel like a non-objective painter at all. Today some artists feel they have to go back to the figure, and that word 'figure' becomes such a ridiculous omen--if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it" (ibid).