Willem de Kooning Women 1

The work of art which I chose to research is perhaps Willem de Kooning's most famous abstract expressionist paintings. The Woman 1 is a oil on canvas painting, it took Willem de Kooning close to two years to finish the painting 1950-1952 . It is one of 6 series of paintings of a woman by Willem de Kooning. Once completed the six painting were shown at the Sydney Janis gallery in New York 1953, Woman 1 was later brought by the Museum of Modern Art proving it’s de Kooning’s best work out of the six.

The woman depicted on the canvas appears to be sitting down on some kind of a green step or stool. Her enormous live size body dominates the painting. The figure is drawn/outlined and looks flat. There is no modeling or shading, like the figure is intended to look hideous. There is nothing that looks like hair on her head. The face has two huge eyes that take up half the space, two black smudges that might be her nose. The woman is staring right at the viewer with a crooked grin and her teeth sticking out. Her massive body and widespread shoulders suggest that the woman might be overweight. Willem de Kooning deliberately made nothing appear attractive about the figure of this woman.

Willem de Kooning shows a lot of emotion in painting woman 1, he worked on the picture for two years, constantly sanding it down and revising it, one could see the hostility in his work by the dripping colors. The women depicted in the painting was created using scratchy, expressive lines showing the artists aggravation. These emotional, frustrated strokes are reinforced by a random use of complementary colors in vertical and horizontal lines. Colors like different shades of green, white, yellow, realistic flesh tones, bright splashes of red and noticeable brush strokes of blue and orange. Almost like all the colors are meant to stick out. The artist made the woman's form blend into the background by using brushstrokes that draw the background and figure together. He also used similar...