| Artist: | De Kooning, Willem |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Drawing of a Woman | |
| Date: | 1952 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | post WWII | |
| Movement: | Abstract Expressionism | |
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: drawing of a woman, but it is about the gesture as much as the figure. Style: figurative and abstract; no longer a portrait, this is the archetypal Woman; iconic; gestural (his stroke goes 90 miles per hour); goes against his own finesse; a drawing that Ingres would definitely not approve of. Context: later de Kooning drawing done shortly after the breakthrough "Woman I" painting; existential expression of radical freedom going against all systems ("the will to a system is a lack of integrity"--Nietzsche); push-pull between the figurative and the abstract, a dialectic tug-of-war he refuses to resolve. Later Rauschenberg erases a de Kooning drawing very much like this one as his anti-gesture. | ||
