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This first full-length psychological study of the Dutch-American painter concentrates initially on de Kooning's well-known and controversial series of Woman images of the 1950s and attends to the search for meaning of these. Taylor has, amongst many advantages, that of not being tied to any particular school and is able to traverse a range of commentators and analysts of different modalities.
In Chapter 1, he focuses on Woman I and offers the reader a variety of conflicting responses to the piece, its technique and mood. Only occasional reviewers remarked on the humour of the piece and an element of caricature. Most male critics linked the Woman images to sexual violence. Dora Ashton was the first female critic to offer a positive response, stressing an aesthetic and humanistic interpretation.
Taylor also addresses here de Kooning's response to those critics, accusing him of misogyny, violence and attacking the female form. In the 1960s, de Kooning insisted that he meant the 1950s paintings to be ‘funny’, ‘satiric’ and ‘monstrous’. One early critic, Thomas Hess (1968), noted that the women were likely linked to the artist's mother who had traumatized his childhood. Later critics argued against the interpretation of misogyny whilst a challenge to the feminist view came with the remarks of Fionna Barber (1999), who suggested, convincingly, that the female figure in Woman I shows a ‘body in progress: one that is embodied through the slow additive means of brush on to canvas …’ (p. 41).
Chapter 2 continues the search for meanings, looking at the view of some non-clinical commentators. There are Jungian and Freudian perspectives here, and an extended section on the work of Marlene Clark (2020) (drawing more on object relations theory), who believes that the Woman pieces should be read as ‘self-representational rather than self-biographical’ (p. 65), whilst in her view de Kooning created the Woman as comical images. She emphasizes the strong aspect of self-portraiture in the