Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

De Kooning’s work was also an illustration of how abstract expressionismrepresented more of an attitude and approach to painting in generalthan only a commitment to pure abstraction. Constantly measuring himselfagainst the work of past masters of art (especially Picasso and Ingres), deKooning sought to absorb the achievements of European modernism intothe qualities of his fast-paced, action-oriented urban life style. Out of theseinfluences emerged his most famous and long-lived subject, “the Women.”De Kooning has confessed both the compelling attraction and thetraditional sources of this image, which called up in him “anxiousness…fright maybe, or ecstasy”: “The Women had to do with the female paintedthrough all the ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent;I couldn’t go on.” In an interview, he further described how the attempts toseize the reality of woman as subject presented endless possibilities for himto test his “performance” against that of past artists. As part of his fascinationwith banal qualities of American popular culture, he has also relatedhis Women to the giant women on billboards and trucks and on pin-up posters—theubiquitous and iconic public goddesses of sex and sales-pitches.In his earlier paintings of women, de Kooning used obvious gesturalbrush strokes and a faceting of the figure into small overlapping planes toassert the reality of the flat picture surface and the physicality of the canvassupporting the paint, while at the same time he refused to completely denythe illusion of bulky volume of the figure’s body and the illusionary deepspace of the room she was seated within. Beginning with his Woman I paintingof 1950–1952, de Kooning rejected both traditional illusory picture spaceand modernist composition in flat planes. He developed his concept of “noenvironment” to express the shifting lack of specificity of the urban scene,how both interior and exterior city scenes can seem so similar to relatedscenes in other parts of the city. He added to this a kind of “no environment”of the woman’s body, which he termed “intimate proportions.” In otherwords, he came to equate the changeability and multiple meanings of hiswoman image with the perpetually changing impressions on the streets ofManhattan. Thus, she also was apprehended simultaneously as a complexof passing sensations, passions, moods, and symbolic meanings.To express this in his post-1952 Women paintings, de Kooning destroyedthe boundary between the figure and the setting, so that the twoelements more or less merged into a single overall image—all fragments ofsimilar importance in the continuous stream of visual encounters (Figure17). The central mystery of his art lies in the expressive tension he sets upbetween the ordering powers of the artist and the mysteries of ambiguityand multiple meaning in our lived experience. He seems to suggest that128