Woman I
Oil on canvas by Willem de Kooning, 1950–1952. The first and most celebrated canvas of de Kooning's Women series. A monumental, aggressively gestural painting of a frontal female figure with bared teeth, wide eyes, and fleshy, distorted anatomy. De Kooning worked on the canvas for approximately two years, nearly abandoning it before critic Meyer Schapiro persuaded him to continue. Purchased by MoMA in 1953, the year it was completed. Prompted controversy over both its figuration (seen as a retreat from Abstract Expressionism) and its representation of women (labelled misogynist by Hilton Kramer and later feminist critics).
Scholarly Significance
Anchor the de Kooning cluster with Woman I — the most famous canvas of the Women series, at MoMA, and the focal point of the misogyny controversy that tracks the hostile→rehabilitation→canonical reception arc.
Notes
- ·De Kooning began the painting in 1950 and worked on it through approximately 40 documented states, scraping and repainting extensively. The art critic and Columbia professor Meyer Schapiro visited the studio in 1952, saw the near-abandoned canvas, and urged de Kooning to continue — Schapiro's encouragement is credited with saving the work.
- ·Hilton Kramer's 1953 review in Arts Digest called the Women series a 'misogynist assault' and criticised de Kooning for abandoning the purity of abstraction.
- ·Feminist art historians including Carol Duncan (in 'The MoMA's Hot Mamas', 1989) and Griselda Pollock have analysed the Women series as reflecting a pathological masculine gaze, arguing that the institutional canonisation of the work at MoMA normalised aggressive representations of women.
- ·De Kooning's own statements about the Women series emphasise his interest in landscape, the Venus figure in art history, totem figures, and specifically the grinning woman in cigarette advertisements — not misogyny.
- ·Woman I is typically paired with Woman II (1952, MoMA) and Woman III (1952–53, private collection) in scholarly discussion of the series.