The View from de Kooning

Abstract

Looking at an early de Kooning called Summer Couch at Allan Stone's gallery in the late sixties, Edwin Denby told how, in the forties when that painting was done, de Kooning had intended “a wind blowing across the surface,” to keep the parts off kilter while the overall composition settled in. The painting's furniture scheme admitted an undertow (there were sharks in that wind) and a finely tethered, wobbly balloon. Similarly, in the teeming Woman I, an eventful composure seems the whole point of the image's arrival; Rudy Burckhardt's documentary photographs of the painting at different stages show that the objective was to get the elusive figure to declare herself, to sit still in an otherwise uncertain space. (Once she had plunked herself down, the eyes and smile flared accordingly.)