Woman I

A woman bares enormous staring eyes and a wide, toothy grin, her body and surroundings hacked out in slashing, frenzied strokes of pink, ochre, and white, figure and ground churning together. Willem de Kooning shocked the art world by forcing the human figure back into abstraction at the height of its dominance, working and reworking the canvas with ferocious energy. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Woman I is the most famous of his Woman series - savage, comic, and unsettling, an ancient image of the female idol convulsed by the violence of Abstract Expressionist paint.