Woman, II

Willem de Kooning, 1952 · Gallery 401 · Floor 4

Look at that smile. Just above the lips. See that straight edge? Sorta looks like he cut the mouth out of something and stuck it on. It's paint. But on the first painting in this series, de Kooning actually did use mouths cut from magazines. Advertising smiles. He said it helped to have something real there. This is Woman Two. The first one took him nearly two years. Paint her in. Scrape whole sections off. Paint her in again. Try following one of her arms. There's an outline, then it just kinda disappears into the paint. Drips run down her chest. And this guy could draw. Years of academy training in Rotterdam. So... getting a woman onto the canvas wasn't the problem. Leaving her alone was. At one point he took the first painting off the stretcher and gave up. A friend encouraged him to go back to it. So back she went. Which makes you wonder: how the hell does he know when it's finished? Years later, somebody actually asked him. He said simply: "I just stop." Alright, well... that clears that up. Anyway, this one he painted in the summer of 1952, on an art dealer's porch in East Hampton. Leo Castelli's. So... in 1953, he shows six of the women together. By now, he's made his name painting things that don't look like things. And here he is painting women again. Some of the other painters took that personally. At the after party, Jackson Pollock reportedly tells him, "Bill, you betrayed it. You're doing the figure, you're still doing the same goddamn thing." So... apparently, there were rules. Other people saw the paintings as violent, misogynistic. Anyway, when MoMA bought the first one, their own committee found it "quite frightening." But... they also liked the color.

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