Willem de Kooning

During the course of his prolific career of nearly seven decades, Willem de Kooning expanded the language of painting with a mastery that had few equals in the twentieth century. Along with Jackson Pollock, de Kooning is the painter most closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, the seminal American movement of the postwar era. Some of de Kooning’s most celebrated works meld abstraction with figuration and landscape.

Woman and Bicycle belongs to a series of seven paintings of women de Kooning created between 1950 and 1953. With her double mouth, straight-on gaze, and voluptuous figure, rendered in a clashing palette with raw, jagged brushwork, the woman confronts the viewer with an almost visceral force. Although the near-violent energy of his painterly gestures led some to accuse de Kooning of misogyny, for the artist the series was more a reverent, sensual homage to the feminine.

In the late 1950s, motivated in part by a larger studio and a move to the more rural setting of Springs, on New York’s Long Island, de Kooning began to paint with greater openness: a “full arm sweep.” He mixed his paint with more liquidity and applied it with a speed and force that is especially apparent in Door to the River, the apogee of a group of abstracted landscapes inspired by water, light, and motion (and by his many car trips between Manhattan and Springs). De Kooning described the content of these so-called Parkway and Pastoral Landscapes as “emotions . . . landscapes and highways and sensations . . . outside the city— with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it.”