Lecture: Figuring Gender in the Works of Willem de Kooning and Beyond

In this talk Christa Noel Robbins discusses how gender is figured in Willem de Kooning’s paintings and drawings—many of which are featured in the exhibition Willem de Kooning Drawing.

Focusing on de Kooning’s unorthodox process, she shows that gender is destabilized in these works, appearing as a deeply ambivalent expression that can be likened to one’s own conflicted experience of inhabiting gender. Robbins will also explore similarly ambivalent expressions of identity in the works of other key New York School painters.

Support for this program is provided by the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

About the Speaker

Christa Noel Robbins is an associate professor of 20th- and 21st-century art and criticism at the University of Virginia and the 2024-2025 Getty Scholar for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. Her book Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. Her essays and reviews can be found in several journals, including American Art, The Oxford Art Journal, Criticism, Art in America, Art Journal, and Critical Inquiry. She was the advisory editor of North American modernism for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. She is currently writing a book on the abstract painter William T. Williams.

If you have any questions about programming, please reach out to [email protected].

Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email [email protected].

Sponsors

Willem de Kooning Drawing is made possible through the lead support of The Willem de Kooning Foundation.

Major support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, The Regenstein Foundation Fund, and the Maureen & Edward Byron Smith, Jr. Exhibition Endowment Fund. 

Additional support is provided by the Lewis and Susan Manilow Fund and the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.