Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Woman, I
Willem de Kooning American, born The Netherlands
Not on view
The result of a protracted period of labor that involved the creation and destruction of many other possible versions, Woman, I appears to be suspended in a state of arrested development. The effect was deliberate: throughout his career, de Kooning prized experimentation, editing, and testing. To this end, he employed a range of techniques, from cutting, masking, and collaging to scraping, wiping, and blotting. Although he also produced individual sketches, the real sketching happened on his canvases. Yet this alone does not account for the unfinished quality of his finished painting. De Kooning’s purposefully fluid, undisciplined brushwork and his tendency to disregard contour lines produce a visual chaos that suggests incompletion, whether spatial, physical, or technical. "I refrain from finishing," the artist said in 1958. He elaborated in 1960: "I was never interested . . . [in] how to make a good painting. . . . I didn’t want to pin it down at all."
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