On July 18, 1926, one 22-year-old man stowed away on the British freighter SS Shelley, in Rotterdam, port of the Netherlands, en route to North America. With little more than the clothes on his back, he embarked on the 12-day journey to Virginia, unaware of what awaited him. This man would turn out to be one of the most prominent abstract painters of his time. His name: Willem de Kooning. While it would take some 20 years and many odd jobs across the East Coast of the United States, de Kooning’s works would become some of the most well-known pieces of abstract expressionism in the contemporary age. Analysis of his early work, his black and white abstractions, The Women collection, and The Landscapes collection will demonstrate the historical and artistic factors that influenced his work, and will reveal elements within…show more content… Woman as Landscape (c. 1955) acquires meaning as artistic burial and resurrection. And since 1955, Woman has turned out to be de Kooning’s phoenix, working her way into his consciousness and clambering back to the surface of his paintings. Woman as Landscape is unfinished. De Kooning let it out of his studio only because of his dealer’s insistence, and this may have saved the painting from the slashing of de Kooning’s brush. De Kooning spread the woman to nearly all the edges of the canvas. The painting clearly shows the figure submerged in landscape. Women and landscape have been in close association in art for centuries in ancient and Baroque Floras, Giogione’s Venus, and Henry Moore’s works, for example.12 Woman as Landscape possesses intense color, resembling de Kooning’s Women, but it is less fractured. The brushwork disrupts the surface planes with twisting, smearing, and flaying strokes that pull from the inside, opening it up in an almost surgical way. The brushwork seen in this piece as well as his Women supplants Woman as the subject of his
