I thought I might as well stick to the idea that it's got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck.'Дistinguishing features: Eyes as big as grenades, teeth grinning violently, huge limbs, mountainous breasts - this 'woman' is exaggeratedly, absurdly physical and at the same time not there at all, a spewed monster of fantasy, a crude graffito that took two anguished years to paint. Woman I 'did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light, because that was the one thing I wanted to get hold of. Subject: De Kooning described the figurative motif of this painting not as a representation but as a thing slapped on the canvas, liberating him from formal anxieties. He was the greatest colourist since Matisse.Дe Kooning's mentor in New York was the Armenian immigrant artist Arshile Gorky classic de Kooning abstractions such as Attic (1949) suggest forms being crushed, chopped, hammered into the flat world of the painting, taking Gorky's ideas and making them harsher. De Kooning's canvases feel as if they were made with a giant hand, yet the wide smears of paint are unexpectedly delicate, the colours pink and aquamarine. His paintings exist on a colossal scale, even though, in contrast to Pollock or Rothko, they are recognisable as traditional European-style pictures. The chaos is in de Kooning.Д«orn in Rotterdam and arriving illegally in the US in 1926, de Kooning was a caustic, gritty, dirty-minded New York painter. Pollock was celebrated as an 'action painter', and his fame, as de Kooning said, broke the ice for American artists - yet Pollock's style is in fact classically ordered, a vision of nature (he painted best in rural Long Island) in which he insisted there is 'no chaos, dammit!'. Artist: Willem de Kooning (1904-97), even more than his contemporary Jackson Pollock, initiated a freeness, largeness and urban energy in modern American art.

Willem de kooning woman i