When we now look at works of modern art - canvases that a generation ago seemed vitally avant-garde - we see pieces that have taken their position in the long march of art history. Works by the great Modernist artists remain great, but they have become inherently historical rather than modern. We now have enough aesthetic and temporal distance from the significant mid-20th-century artists like Joan Miro and Willem De Kooning - whom we are focusing on in this paper - and understand not only how their style developed out of what came before them but also what their style would evolve into. Modern art is no longer the end of the art historical march but rather a step along the way.
De Kooning's work is prototypically mid-century: Along with Jackson Pollock, whose work was even more abstract, De Kooning was one of the most significant and influential painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His 1952/3 work "Woman IV" demonstrates all of the energy that is the signature characteristic of this school of art as well as the tendency of Abstract Expressionist artists to fill the entire canvas. While pre-modern artists tended to divide the canvas into a central space defined by the most important figures in a composition (with the periphery also often inhabited by important figures), Abstract Expressionists tended to fill the entire canvas with a nearly equal degree of color and imagery.
This painting is, as one might suspect from its name, one of a series of works. Between 1950 and 1953 De Kooning created a series of six portraits of individual women. In each case, as is true in this fourth element of the series, the canvas is dominated by the figure of a single woman that is highly exaggerated. The female form here is in no possible manner realistic: She is stretched out and distorted as if she were a cartoon figure from the colored Sunday comics that had been transferred to a piece of Silly Putty and then stretched into a grotes...