A female figure grins, glares, and seems to lurch from a storm of paint. She is comic, frightening, sexualized, and unstable. De Kooning scraped and repainted her for years. The result feels less like a portrait than a battle between image, desire, and the act of painting itself.
Oil on canvas with aggressive brushwork, scraping, revision, and layered impasto.
The woman draws from idols, pinups, goddesses, and advertising, turning modern femininity into a charged battlefield.
The painting appeared amid debates about abstraction, mass culture, gender, and postwar American identity.
“I have to change to stay the same.”
It became one of the most debated figurative works of Abstract Expressionism.
What did this stir in you?