Woman IV is a painting from a series of works done in the 1950s known as the Women series painted by Willem De Kooning. This large-scale painting immediately draws a viewer in with its evidence of the expressionistic movement of a brush loaded with thick paint, the ild, splashy gestures, of the artist, and the seemingly random placement of colors found on the canvas of the painting. Out of what appears to be controlled chaos, De Kooning depicts the looming form of a monstrous woman. The woman’s anatomy is seemingly separated and stretched across the canvas. Her enormously exaggerated breasts, appear flattened like saucer plates , and her massive arms appear to be shaped alikelegs ibyDe Kooning’s principle of interchangeable anatomies (Cateforis, 3).
Woman IV and the related paintings and drawings that were exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 (Devree, X8), sent shock waves through the art world with art critics from the different schools of thought attacking De Kooning. “Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the Women,” De Kooning noted in 1960, “but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t feel like a nonobjective painter at all…. I look at them now and they seem vociferous and ferocious. I think it had to do with the idea of the idol, the oracle, and above all the hilariousness of it” (Yard, 56) De Kooning conceived of the paintings as irreverent homages to the age-old tradition of the female nude in Western painting and sculpture. For De Kooning the Women also had to do with that icon of postwar American Popular culture, the all-American girl—the beautiful, smiling young woman of cigarette ads and toothpaste commercials (Hess, 30-33). Academically trained historians and museum curators in the 1970s and 1980s carefully traced the formal and iconographic sources of the Women to prehistoric fertility figures, Mesopotamian idols, Byzantine icons, and images of female nudes by such early masters as Rembrandt, Hals, Ingres, Manet, Cezanne, and Picasso. The scholars also wrote of the historical importance of De Kooning’s Women series, citing De Kooning’s involvement with the mass-media image of the smiling all-American girl as having inspired the iconography of Pop artists Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann and parodies of De Kooning’s paintings by Pete Saul, Mel Ramos, and Robert Colescott (Cateforis,9). The Women series of paintings were also decried by critics as blatant male chauvinism, contempt for women, or perverted sexism. Feminist critic Carol Duncan charged that De Kooning, like Picasso and another male modernist, had sought to affirm his own artistic and sexual liberation by painting female figures who were themselves monstrously distorted and less than fully human. Duncan argued that De Kooning’s women served to reinforce on a cultural level the social and sexual power that men assert over women under patriarchy (Duncan 171-178).
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Willem de Kooning’s paintings are entranced by his particular experience. As the 1950’s opened, “triumphant women glare like pinups turned guerrilla girls. Four years into that decade of affluence and McCarthyism, the devouring seductresses retreat to make way for madcap beachgoers. The raucous girls next door are soon absorbed into robustly brushed abstractions redolent of the city and the slow curves and long vectors of the highways (Yard, 7). The role that De Kooning seems to attach to Woman IV and the Women series goes well beyond any apparent definitions and stereotypical notions of femininity. The women that De Kooning depicts are individuals in their own right, and they become a reflection of the social and political upheavals of the day. They are more than mere projections of male yearnings and desires, they were the force in which all the many different modes of artistic expression by De Kooning culminated. Influenced by the writings of Dostoevsky, De Kooning seeks the synthesis of existential experience as the constantly changing, “unstable variable” in the act of painting itself. The boundaries dividing subject and object become increasingly fluid by the immediacy of the painterly gesture (Schulz-Hoffmann, 12). The autonomy of Woman IV with its separation from traditional norms is the result of De Kooning’s elimination of the distinctions between subject and object, between artist and work of art. “They do have a certain ferocity,” he admitted, “but that has to do with paint” (Schulz-Hoffman, 19). De Kooning treats the subject matter, women, by shifting the focus from a contextual to a predominantly painterly level, they are autonomous women whose strength is the result of breaking with the norm of the day.
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