In 2006, at a private auction, Woman III was bought by billionaire Stephen Cohen. However, after the 1979 revolution, strict rules regarding the visual arts were adopted in the country, and the canvas was quietly sold to business tycoon David Geffen. Moreover, the artist used the same colours and shades for the figure and its surroundings, making it dissolve in an indistinguishable environment.ĭespite all the controversy and ambiguity, the painting was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in Tehran in the 70s. this painting is called woman 1 and it has the number after it because ultimately there were six such large-scale paintings of single women that de Kooning worked on in the 1950s the woman of the painting is daring out at the viewer with a kind of ferocity and a kind of toothy glare that makes her anything but a typical seductress or muse that one might think of in terms of the hundreds of years of paintings of female subjects this is a painting that he began after having worked in an. De Kooning seemed to interfere, fuse the female figure into the surrounding space, combining the lines of her body with the background in long strokes. His “women” became the ideal subject for such a study.
Throughout his career, the artist has tirelessly studied the relationship between a subject and a background on canvas. Deliberately abandoning this idealization, de Kooning created completely new heroines, who were considerably much more realistic, despite their abstractness. These women were too far from the stereotypical image of the submissive American housewife of the Cold War times. They were aggressively sexual and terrifyingly outspoken.
Willem de kooning woman i series#
De Kooning’s dealer later said that he worked on this series with some particular cruelty and he even left small holes in the canvas with his brush sometimes, furiously applying the strokes.ĭe Kooning’s “women” were dramatically different from any female depictions in Western art. Like all the works from the Women series that were painted in the early 50s ( 1, 2, 3), it caused a lot of controversy. The artist’s nervous and aggressive manner, combined with such, to put it mildly, non-standard depiction of female nakedness, puzzled and frightened the public. Woman III is one of the most famous and most expensive paintings by Willem de Kooning.
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