Art History Write Short Post 300 words (150…

1. Write a personal reflection on the painting Willem de Kooning WOMAN I. This should be based on your own observations, thoughts, feelings. Please use this portion of the discussion to discuss the formal elements and subject matter.

2. Discuss the cultural changes happening during the period covered in the reading. Compare that culture to contemporary American culture. This should be a personal reflection of the comparison of cultures from your perspective/experience, not a summary of the text.

You may use the internet to research.

From the textbook:

In contrast, Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) insisted, “Art

never seems to make me peaceful or pure.” Immigrating from his

native Netherlands to the United States in 1926, he initially painted

nonrepresentationally, but he shocked the New York art world in

the early 1950s by returning to the figure with a series of paintings

of women. The first, WOMAN I (FIG. 20–6), took him almost

two years to finish. De Kooning’s wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning

(1918–1989), said that he painted it, scraped it, and repainted

it about 200 times. Part of de Kooning’s dissatisfaction stemmed

from the way his subject, a figure inspired by conventionally pretty

images of women seen in American advertising, kept veering away

from those models. What emerges in Woman I is not the elegant

companion of advertising fantasy but a powerful adversary, more

dangerous than alluring. The prettiness of the soft pastel colors and

the luxuriousness of the painted surface are nearly lost in the furious

slashing of his brush. The image is powerfully sexual, full of implied

violence, and intensely passionate, like a great fertility goddess. But

on another level it connects with the coloristic tradition of artists

such as Titian and Rubens, who superbly transformed female flesh

into luscious layers of paint.