36-7Willem de Kooning,Woman I,1950–1952. Oil on canvas,
6 37 – 8 4 10 . Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Although rooted in figuration, including pictures of female models on
advertising billboards, de Kooning’s Woman Idisplays the energetic
application of pigment typical of gestural abstraction.36-8Barnett Newman,Vir Heroicus Sublimis,1950–1951. Oil on canvas, 7 113 – 8 17 9 –^14 . Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of Mr. and
Mrs. Ben Heller).
Newman’s canvases consist of a single slightly modulated color field split by “zips” (narrow bands) running from one edge of the painting to the
other, energizing the color field and giving it scale.974 Chapter 36 EUROPE AND AMERICA AFTER 1945WILLEM DE KOONINGDespite the public’s skepticism about
Pollock’s art, other artists enthusiastically pursued similar avenues of
expression. Dutch-born Willem de Kooning(1904–1997) also de-
veloped a gestural abstractionist style. Even images such as Woman I
(FIG. 36-7), although rooted in figuration, display the sweeping ges-
tural brush strokes and energetic application of pigment typical of
gestural abstraction. Out of the jumbled array of slashing lines and ag-
itated patches of color appears a ferocious-looking woman with star-
ing eyes and ponderous breasts. Her toothy smile, modeled on an ad
for Camel cigarettes, becomes a grimace. Female models on advertis-
ing billboards partly inspired Woman I,one of a series of female im-
ages, but de Kooning’s female forms also suggest fertility figures and a
satiric inversion of the traditional image of Venus, goddess of love.
Process was important to de Kooning, as it was to Pollock. Con-
tinually working on Woman I for almost two years, de Kooning
painted an image and then scraped it away the next day and began
anew. His wife Elaine, also a painter, estimated that he painted ap-
proximately 200 scraped-away images of women on this canvas be-
fore settling on the final one.
In addition to this Woman series, de Kooning created nonrepre-
sentational works dominated by huge swaths and splashes of pig-
ment. His images suggest rawness and intensity. His dealer, Sidney
Janis (1896–1989), confirmed this impression, recalling that de
Kooning occasionally brought him paintings with ragged holes in
them, the result of overly vigorous painting. Like Pollock, de Koon-
ing was very much “in” his paintings. That kind of physical interac-
tion between the painter and the canvas led the critic Harold Rosen-
berg (1906–1978) to describe the work of the New York School as
action painting.In his influential 1952 article “The American Action
Painters,” Rosenberg described the attempts of Pollock, de Kooning,
and others to get “inside the canvas.”
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American
painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as
a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an1 ft.
1 ft.36-7AKLINE,
Mahoning,1956.