Two Women III

One of the leaders of Abstract Expressionism in New York, Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, where he attended art school and worked as a commercial artist. At the age of twenty-two, he stowed away on a New York-bound ship and soon encountered many artists of the avant-garde, including John Graham, Arshile Gorky, and Stuart Davis.

In 1938, De Kooning met twenty-year-old fellow artist Elaine Fried, whom he would marry five years later, and began working on his Women series. The fragmentation, eroticism, and gestural immediacy of those works continued in the 1950s with his second Women series. In 1952, De Kooning completed his iconic Woman I (Museum of Modern Art, New York), on which he worked for two years. This painting, along with five other versions of the subject, was exhibited in De Kooning's third one-man show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in March 1953, where both critics and the public were offended by what they perceived as its violence and sexism.

At the same time De Kooning was working on his Woman paintings of 1950-52, he made many drawings exploring the same theme-indeed, drawing was always integral to De Kooning's painting. Some of these drawings he even attached to his canvases and painted over, expressing the interconnectedness between his works in different media. In the summer of 1952, while at his summer home in Easthampton, New York, De Kooning made dozens of pastels. Many, like the AMAM drawing, represent two standing women and look back to an early stage of Woman I. The origins of that painting included a seven-foot- high drawing of two women that De Kooning made on two sheets and attached to his wall; the drawing was destroyed as the painting developed.

The energy and violence of De Kooning's draftsmanship is particularly strong in the AMAM drawing, which shows the artist exploring ways to express the essence of the figures' structure. The unlabored application of pastel, charcoal, and graphite suggests the speed with which De Kooning quickly captured a thought or impression before moving on to the next. The real subject of this sketch is the process of drawing itself. In the absence of other depictions of two women, a drawing like this one could also plausibly be read as one woman seen from the front and the back- perhaps suggesting a cinematographic mode. De Kooning explicitly integrated the color of the paper within the drawing to neutralize any background effect-just as he worked to make the backgrounds of his paintings into the vague, indefinite spaces he called "no-environments."