85th Avenue at 10th Street

“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” — Willem de Kooning

The image was some sort of representation of a woman; the breasts were there, the eyelashes, the high heels. The piece was an expressionistic piece; the emotion was there, the brushstrokes were telling stories; the work did not look like a photograph. In the piece was the whole of Downtown. The artwork that came out of de Kooning’s shared studio at 85th and 10th is representative not only of the subject but of the changing city in which it was created. Artists have painted women for hundreds of years but until the mid 1900s they did not look like Woman 1. De Kooning, along with other artists of the abstract expressionism movement, embraced the megalopolis they were living in - a place where now anything goes. Expressionism was deemed degenerate in Europe during the Second World War but now in New York, the new style of art became a modern phenomenon. Focusing on the process of creation instead of subject reflected the every day lives of people struggling to populate and be successful in the big city. Urbanization was no doubt creating chaos in the city; with the amount of people moving into the cities, finding a means of income or surviving as an artist would have been challenge. All the frustrations of chaos, the fun of living, the old subject matter and the new techniques can be found in a single painting. Without painting the landscapes or faces of New York, de Kooning captures what it meant to be living in the middle of something new – a place where I currently find myself both in New York and in Abu Dhabi.

Woman 1. Willem de Kooning. 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6' 3 7/8" x 58" (192.7 x 147.3 cm).