Notebook: More on de Kooning's women

Here are a handful of random odds-and-ends from my notebook about the Museum of Modern Art's Willem de Kooning retrospective. Some of this is discussed in greater depth on this week's Modern Art Notes Podcast, which features de Kooning co-biographer Mark Stevens talking about the exhibition and de Kooning's life. (More details on downloading this week's show and subscribing to the podcast are at the bottom of this post.)

• Curator John Elderfield's exhibition includes eight of de Kooning's major Woman paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Five of them are from de Kooning's most famous body of work: The six-painting semi-series of single women that de Kooning finished in about 1953, and three are Woman paintings that de Kooning completed in 1948 and 1949, before he undertook the more famous (but not greater) paintings. As I argued in part one of my review, these late 1940s paintings are the pivotal works in de Kooning's oeuvre, in particular Woman (1948, at right).
• Elderfield's exhibition shows how de Kooning's paintings of figures changed between the early 1940s and the end: De Kooning's figures start out seated (and often in profile). The 1948 Woman is a landmark painting for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons is that de Kooning begins to get away from the need to sit his subject in a chair, which allows him to create full-field compositions of a single woman, and ultimately the great series in the early '50s. In Woman (1948) the figure's chair has begun to dissolve -- only its arms are evident. By the next two paintings of women the chair is gone. By the early 1950s paintings de Kooning has flattened space so much that it's not always clear whether is subject is seated or lying down.
• Speaking of which, I don't think the figure in MoMA's famed Woman I (1950-52) is seated or standing. I think she's lying down with her knees up and her legs in the air. As critic Phyllis Tuchman noted to me after I suggested that to her over the weekend: Look at Rauschneberg's Bed (1955). Tuchman suggested that maybe Rauschenberg, who was fascinated by de Kooning's work in this period, was specifically looking at and thinking about Woman I as featuring a woman lying down in bed, at minimum.
• De Kooning did not enjoy painting hands. Sometimes his arms end in no hands at all, sometimes he just suggested hands by smearing the ends of his arms into nothingness. I was particularly interested in the hands in Woman II (1952, at right). I think they were informed by the way Picasso placed Marie-Therese Walter's hands in La Reve (1932).
• Speaking of de Kooning and Picasso, this circa 1948 drawing of three women is de Kooning's take on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
• Mark Stevens and I batted around some of these details (and much more!) on this week's Modern Art Notes Podcast. To download the program, click here. To download/subscribe via iTunes, click here. To subscribe via RSS, click here. Click here to stream the show and to see the images discussed on the program.