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In Willem de Kooning's Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration, Dr. Graeme Taylor has written a comprehensive art historical and psychoanalytic study. The book presents an interplay between de Kooning's life, the creation of his abstract Women portraits, and a wealth of psychoanalytic reflections about the painter and his work.
Willem de Kooning's contributions to 20th-century American art appeared in his pioneering abstractions. The Women series, painted primarily in the 1950s and '60s are his most well-known works, and have always evoked controversy. De Kooning's career, which spanned 60 prolific years, was a springboard for many of the innovations of modern American painting. His work was inspired by the European modernists, and developed alongside other abstract and action painters whose work was shown in the emerging New York galleries at the time. In tandem with these changes, psychoanalysts were expanding the realm of psychoanalytic theory to include the role of environment, attachment, and trauma in human development. In this meticulous book, Dr. Taylor has brought contemporary psychoanalytic thinking to de Kooning's life and art.
De Kooning was a gifted artist with classical training in drawing and draftsmanship. As a child, he suffered hardship and abuse. At age 21 he fled his native Rotterdam as a stowaway. During childhood, he had developed a romantic fascination with America, reading about Walt Whitman, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Wild West. He liked jazz and Hollywood movies (Taylor, , p. 100). When he arrived in the US, he hoped to find work as a commercial artist. Eventually, he made his way to New York and met artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, with whom he shared a community of painters. These artists were the successors of the Cubists and created new techniques of abstraction.