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If Willem de Kooning were painting his controversial “Woman” series today, he would likely be viewed as a misogynist-a position held by art critics for decades. The Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott (2011), in a review of the retrospective of de Kooning's work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011, wrote:
No matter how resolutely one focuses on de Kooning's formal accomplishments, the women he painted in the 1950s, and later in lubricious hues of pink, are unnecessarily loud and vulgar, with lurid smiles, enormous breasts, gaping eyes and a carnivalesque sense of sexual power and volatility.
In Newsday in 1969, art critic Emily Genauer wrote:
[de Kooning] flays [women], beats them, stretches them on racks, draws and quarters them…. It isn't the contempt in de Kooning's works that I mind, per se. It's the absence of wholeness and diversity in a great talent who seems to have chained himself to a leering, lynx-eyed totem pole (The Art Story, 2023).
The first time I saw one of his “Woman” paintings years ago in The Museum of Modern Art, I didn't understand why anyone would be drawn to his work, especially when juxtaposed with the luminous colours of Monet's waterlilies, which were (and remain) prominently featured in the museum. So why am I writing about de Kooning's women today?
My appreciation of his paintings has developed over the years and has inspired me to push the boundaries in my own work, both as a painter and psychoanalyst, cultivating an attitude that seeks to find the growth edges where new discoveries occur. The impressions of his paintings that I carry with me today have taken on a sort of internal patina with a warm resonance that remains gritty and alive. I find his paintings sensual and inspirational. His thick, textured layers of oil
paint applied with gestural brush strokes in luscious, bold complementary colours, usually including his own version of “flesh pink”, create nuanced mini-worlds to move around and get lost in. De Kooning's painti