Willem de Kooning’s Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration, by Graeme J. Taylor (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Willem de Kooning’s Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration, by Graeme J. Taylor Jane Hanenberg (bio) Willem de Kooning’s Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration, by Graeme J. Taylor 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 stow-away. 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, 2022, 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. [End Page 615] De Kooning began the Women series in 1950 after he had been working on portraits of women for almost a decade. The paintings represented a departure from the purely abstract works that had brought prominence to the artist and his peers. His boyhood studies at art school gave de Kooning a unique entrée into the discipline of figurative work. He knew about color and techniques of paint application. He had used the bulky brushes and thick pigments that provided him with the tools to paint the abstractions of his earlier career. Later, they became part of the technique he used to develop the multilayered Women canvases. In the first chapter, Taylor describes the art world’s reactions to the Women. Six of the paintings in the series were featured in a 1953 gallery show, and they immediately evoked heated debate. Initially, most critics responded somewhat guardedly, commenting on the paintings’ technique, which employed blaring, acrid colors, energetically applied with viscous paint. The paintings had gone through numerous transformations of scraping down and reconfiguring. Some felt that de Kooning’s return to the figure was a regressive diversion from the prior decade’s innovations of complete abstraction. The Women had no resemblance to the black and white canvases he had painted in the prior decade, which had given rise to the terms “Abstract Expressionism” and “the New York School.” As the paintings continued to be shown, critics reacted to the perceived ugliness of the images. Some assumed that the work was representative of sexual violence (Geist 1953, p. 19). Woman I is a grinning figure with bulging eyes and breasts, sharp teeth, and high heels. The figure itself is discontinuous, arms and head askew. The ensuing Women followed in the same vein. Many saw the figures as menacing and monstrous; “the awesome, devouring goddesses with the power to destroy the male’s sexual potency” (Cateforis, 1991, as cited in Taylor, 2022, p. 23). The images evoked many comments about misogyny and sexual violence. De Kooning was unprepared for the fury. He thought the paintings were humorous and protested that he was a caricaturist who was influenced by the love of the comics and popular culture...