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

(crowd chattering)

Good evening, everyone, and welcome. As we begin, a brief reminder to please silence your cell phones. My name is Kevin Salatino, and I am Chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute, and co-curator of the exhibition, "Willem de Kooning Drawing." I am delighted you could join us for this evening's program held in conjunction with and complimenting the exhibition.

We're grateful to the organizations and donors who have supported this exhibition. "Willem de Kooning Drawing" is made possible through the lead support of the Willem de Kooning Foundation. Support for this program is provided by the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

And now it's my great pleasure and privilege to introduce the speaker for this evening's program. Christa Noel Robbins is an associate professor of 20th and 21st century art and criticism at the University of Virginia and the '2024-'25 Getty Scholar for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. 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, and she is currently writing a book on the abstract painter, William T. Williams. For the catalog accompanying the Art Institute's current exhibition, "William de Kooning Drawing," Dr. Robbins wrote the essay, "Drawings and Paintings on the 'Theme of the Woman,'" a critical reassessment of a controversial topic within de Kooning studies and the starting point for tonight's lecture.

Now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Robbins to the stage. (crowd applauding)

Thank you so much. It's so good to be here. I went to the University of Chicago for my doctorate and taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and I haven't been back for about eight years.

That's really wonderful to be in Chicago and to be in this institution, which was so formative to my coming up as a scholar. So, yeah, I'm so grateful to everybody. I'm especially grateful to to Charlotte Healy and to Kevin Salatino and Mel Salamon and Sheila Majumdar.

I'm really especially grateful to Charlotte for walking through so many collections with me in New York and today at the Institute looking at de Kooning drawings. She's been a great looking companion. I'm especially grateful for the opportunity to think a little more carefully about Willem de Kooning, thinking in particular about how gender can be seen to enter his work.

It's easy to explain away the treatment of gender in de Kooning's paintings and drawings by referring to his treatment of women in his life. He was, after all, a notorious philanderer, which maybe some of you guys have been thinking of as you've looked at the exhibition today. But the paintings and drawings, I think because they're good, exceed, it might even be better to say escape de Kooning the person.

Whatever preconceptions de Kooning had about gender, these works seem designed to undermine the very concept of preconception. We can only see the way de Kooning's drawings and paintings complicate how gender shows up, how it shows itself to us, the viewer, if we begin with looking. Looking at this drawing on your right, for example, I think you'd be hard pressed in this audience to identify it as aligning with any given gender.

So it was with looking that I began to really think about this project and I was looking at these drawings, which are in the exhibition, these are just a few of them, known as the "eyes-closed" drawings with Charlotte, actually, when I began to really think about how gender differently manifests itself in de Kooning. And I began all of my projects with looking, which might seem redundant or axiomatic for an art historian to say, but it's not always the case that art historians begin with looking into works of art. We often begin with reading.

And I really found, especially looking at these, in conjunction with some more finished drawings, that they're asking us to look carefully. And in doing so, they begin to undermine some of the assumptions that we make, not just about gender as it manifests in de Kooning, but also how gender manifests in the world. And so in looking at these works and describing in the catalog, I began to sort of think of them against some of the narratives that have dominated de Kooning's story.

And I wanna be really clear that I think that all the texts, I'm about to name are really important texts, and I recommend reading all of them. These are really valuable scholars who have contributed a great deal to our understanding of de Kooning, but also abstract expressionism more generally. But I just want to point out the ways in which a tendency, especially among art historians who we call social historians, so art historians who are attending to the social context within which a work is made, that methodology tends to favor representational content.

And so I'm looking, this is a little unfair, but I have a picture here of T.J. Clark's super recent essay and the London Review of Books, which is titled somewhat salaciously, "V is for Vagina," which he only says once, but, obviously, the editors chose it for the ways in which it drew attention. But it's a long essay that's talking about de Kooning's painting suburb in Havana. And he goes through many iterations of what the V at the center of the painting could stand for.

And one of the things it could stand for is vagina. But one of the reasons I think that I wanna look at it at this article is because of the way in which he uses that icon, the V, that symbol to anchor his reading. So that he's always asking, "What does this painting represent?" Even though it clearly represents nothing, right? It's completely non-objective and very abstract.

So, Clark's tendency to read into, and he's one of the people who really read sexual differences, he called it into de Kooning, this is one of the narratives that I began to push against. The other is, again, by a really important author, scholar, Michael Leja, who wrote the really impressive book that, again, I would recommend, "Reframing Abstract Expressionism." And this is an image from his chapter on what he calls the modern man discourse. And he's interested in that chapter to think about how abstract expressionism, Pollock/de Kooning, we're differently engaging this discourse of man, this kind of post-war humanism that Leja outlines.

And I think that's important because he's treating gender, man, woman, as a discourse. So as a kind of social construct. But when he gets to the paintings, Leja tends to, again, read gender into de Kooning's and Pollock's paintings.

So he says that the specific model of the human subject that abstract expressionism inscribed was profoundly gendered. Finally, in the middle here, we have another great essay by Anne Wagner that was written for the exhibition catalog, "Tracing the Figure," which I also recommend. And she offers a more nuanced reading of gender in de Kooning than either Clark or Leja, saying that de Kooning, and you can see this in the exhibition, that de Kooning relies on doubling indifference in order for him to signal gender.

And so I though it was a really important essay and how it troubled how gender shows up, but at the same time, Wagner consistently describes the works as being about what Wagner calls the woman. So she's reading women into the paintings. Even essays like Fiona Barber's, which is among the few to advocate for slowing down our assumptions about de Kooning by looking and looking again ends by focusing on this very gendered concept, the performance of femininity, as she calls it.

And so I understand this scholarship to be relying on two assumptions. One is how paintings signify, and the other is about how gender shows up in the world. And it was at the moment, looking at these blind drawings, as I've already said, that I began to really question gender in de Kooning in general.

And I was looking at these drawings in conjunction with these more finished drawings at the Museum of Modern Art that I began to really question why I myself was reading these as pictures of, quote-unquote, "women" in part because they're so abstract, and yet they seem to be soliciting me to read gender into them. And so what I noticed with these was that it was certain trappings of femininity. So, stockings, the fishnet stockings.

Below the stocking on your drawing on your left, the fishnet kind of forms itself into a high heel. And we see a lot of high heels in de Kooning paintings and drawings. And on the right, I noticed that there was an iteration of these dots in a line in a lot of his drawings, which I began to read as like buttons on a corset, as undergarments.

So I myself was reading gender repeatedly in these drawings, despite the fact that, as I've said, they're super abstract, that they kind of resist a gender reading. And so I basically assigned myself the task of thinking carefully about gender in these paintings and turned to the scholarship of trans theory, both in art history and outside of it, to think about how abstraction in general has been valued as a means for thinking past normative understandings of gender. So, Gayle Salamon has done a lot to think about how materiality differently figures gender, and David Getsy, who used to teach at the School of the Art Institute, has done a lot to show how abstraction and art presses against our assumptions about how gender should perform in the world.

And so with these theories in the background and considering the ways in which they value abstraction in particular, I started carefully thinking about how gender might be complicated in de Kooning's abstractions. So what I'm gonna do now is read sections of the catalog essay that I wrote. And at the end, I'll return to some of the more contemporary works that were being made around the time of de Kooning's paintings that also kind of trouble how gender and identity show up in general.

So looking at de Kooning's 24 figurative eyes-closed drawings, I was surprised by the way gender showed up. The accumulated marks ostensibly signifying limbs, torso, lips, and eyes in varying degrees of disarray attest to a mode of working in which the artist's eye and hand were intentionally disrupted. The drawings were made by de Kooning's own account in the evenings after he'd finished painting for the day and often in front of the television.

He claimed that they were made with his eyes-closed. To anchor himself while constructing the image, he would place a finger on the page. That placeholding finger is perhaps the reason any image appears at all.

But I asked myself looking at these blind and process-based sketches, "Do they signify gender?" De Kooning, sorry, is known for depicting gendered figures, especially figures that he routinely identified in his titles as "Woman." Much has been written about these women. From Thomas B. Hess's March 1953 art news feature, "De Kooning Paints a Picture," and the excited reception of the exhibition paintings on the theme of the "Woman" at the Sidney Janis Gallery to more recent considerations of his paintings in the context of postwar gender politics. De Kooning has rarely been discussed without the subject of woman arising, whether it is as mother, an Oedipal battle with Pablo Picasso, or proof positive, as Carol Duncan has argued, of the centering of the ritual of male transcendence in high modernist painting.

Accounts of women as theme, figurative content, and motivation have dominated the de Kooning narrative. Looking at the eyes-closed drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the question that came to me was not the why of woman as content and theme, but rather the how and whether of it all. How, I asked, does gender show up, and does it show up at all? Some of the figures in the group of 24 eyes-closed drawings are so abstract as to place signification in radical doubt.

And others, while still tending toward the abstract, have moments of clarity. And what I'm thinking of in particular are, I mean, this is a scumble of lines, right, sort of collapse at the bottom of the page, and yet we see a quaff of hair and eye, some sort of Betty Boop lips. Here in this one in particular, we can begin to identify parts of the body, and maybe begin to associate something like heavy makeup with the gender, female.

It was the male presenting figures, however, that most drew my attention. While these drawings are schematic with only legs... Sorry.

There we go. While these drawings are schematic with only legs and arms articulated, they also have seemingly iconographical representations of penises. It was this top middle drawing, in fact, that first inspired me to think about gender in these works more carefully.

In this series of scumbled figures, which speak more to figurative possibilities than gendered expectations, this sexed icon appears a little too emphatically. "Could it have come later?" I wondered. "Could it have been an afterthought, a belated inscription de Kooning made with eyes open to help guide the legibility of gender throughout?" With this though in place, other drawings came to look similarly sexed, with the squiggle at the center of the drawing on the left suddenly taking on naturalistic form.

The presence of sexed signifiers, however, only goes so far in helping maintain the legibility of gender in these process-based drawings. Other iconographical representations of gender emerge as seemingly free-floating signs or part objects, such as pin-up lips and Betty Boop eyes, ultra femme signifiers that de Kooning began playing with in drawings leading up to the 1953 Janis exhibition. These might read as female if only because of their proximity to representations of femininity and popular culture, which de Kooning was known to draw from.

And I just want to point out this, again, as a drawing in the, or a painting/collage in the exhibition. And he's taken the cutout of this mouth in this Camel cigarette ad and collaged into the painting just to show the ways in which he's looking to popular culture as a signal for what femininity looks like. And these are also in the exhibition, and I think just the focus on hair and lips as themselves as trappings of gender demonstrate a kind of interest on his part on a kind of culturally determined look of something like femininity.

The disordered bodies that accompany such gendered signifiers in the eyes-closed drawings quickly raise doubts about our ability to identify gender through such superficial and iconographic means. A similar thematic theme of purportedly male figures is present in de Kooning's use of a crucifixion formation in the eyes-closed drawings. Beyond the fact that crucified figures are conventionally read as gendered male, these figures also have, as I already said, the most pronounced iconographic depictions of male sex organs.

Even this theme breaks down under scrutiny, however. A crucifixion drawing from the 1970s that features de Kooning's Woman in Rowboat theme, which you see here, includes a figure on a cross seemingly wearing heels and dancing the can-can, which you see here. And, by the way, Kevin has a great essay that shows the connection between the woman in the robe and the crucifixions, which, again, already shows you the way in which gender is being troubled.

So you see the heel here and the kicked up leg. And just to be clear that my reading of that drawing as the can-can is in fact something as silly, we also have the proximate drawing that he's called "Charleston Pose," which has, again, the crucifixion figure, and then this figure in the middle that's doing the Charleston with the hands on them, on the knees. All this is to say that the eyes-closed drawings raise radical doubts about the ability to locate gender as a stable signifier in images produced through such intentionally disruptive approaches.

When gender does take shape, more often than not, it seems tentative and in process. It shows up as a question, as opposed to a description or assertion. Two key operations are at work in these drawings that extend even to the notorious Woman paintings and drawings that were exhibited in 1953.

One is that the eyes-closed drawings and their tenuous legibility capture something essential about figures, both lived and perceived, as complex things. Attending to that complexity reveals that human figures do not inevitably come to "inhabit different sexes and genders," as Gayle Salamon put it. The second operation is that any resolution of this complexity most often unfolds through a heavily mediated process as a late stage graphic intervention or as symbolic content dependent on serial iteration and cultural context.

In the case of de Kooning's drawings and paintings, this belated mediation harnesses and reduces the generative potential of its otherwise open-ended practice. In the essay I wrote for the catalog, my goal was to recover the potential that de Kooning's destabilizing of gender opens onto. In doing so, I aimed to answer David J. Getsy's call to consider what he calls the transgender capacity of the pictorial nude, a consideration that he convincingly argued is an ethical and methodological imperative in art history's approach to, quote, "the complex and layered image that is the human form," end quote.

"As art historians working in a field that traffics in nudes, we must," Getsy wrote, "take it, quote, as 'axiomatic' that seeing someone's body, even in a state of exposure and scrutiny, does not tell us who they are or what gender they know themselves to be," end quote. De Kooning, a notorious painter of nude and semi-nude figures, offered a more capacious picture of gender in his Woman paintings and drawings than most art historians have been ready to acknowledge. This was among the reasons the Janis exhibition caused such a stir.

Horrors of Babylon, frightening, a female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse and infantile in ourselves. That comes from James Fitzsimmons' review of the show. These are just a few contemporaneous responses to the Woman pictures, which were perceived as grotesque and monstrous, not simply because de Kooning depicted them in an aggressive manner as they are often framed, but because he depicted figures that defy normative expectations of how gender should show up in picture making.

And I just want to point out that in Clark's essay from the London Review of Books with "V is for Vagina," he wrote, right before he uses that phrase, "V is for Vagina," he describes de Kooning's abstractions as, quote, "monstrously undecidable." So using that language even today. Rather than focusing on the work's reception and the many critical attempts to harness them into clear depictions of sexed and gendered figures, my catalog essay focused on the works themselves in order to recuperate what artist Amy Sillman described as their awkward, contingent, and faltering approach to bodies and the multiple ways they come to signify. Of all de Kooning's paintings, "Woman I" is the most frequently discussed and explicitly gendered in sexed terms.

De Kooning began the painting in June 1950 and reportedly worked on the canvas for a year and a half before finally putting it aside. It was only after the art historian Myra Shapiro asked to see the discarded work that the artist returned to it and according to Hess, after some finalist seemingly minor adjustments, quote, "declared it finished, i.e., not to be destroyed." That's Hess's account. The figure broad, frontal, and occupying the majority of space on the canvas is handled with a fluid and direct paint and vivid, mainly unmixed colors.

Bearing the traces of the many stages it went through before his final moments, the finished picture seems to have been made as much through subtraction as through addition. With the exception of the face and upper arms, the figure's body is mainly composed of passages left behind after de Kooning scraped away previous compositions. The final form reintroduced at a late stage through an inscribed outline.

Focusing on any single area of the painting, in the midsection, for example, where a flowering of fingers represents the figure's right hand, we quickly lose track of the image. The figure needs to be seen in full in order to be discerned at all. As with the eyes-closed drawings, the final picture arrives late, appearing not as a result of process so much as despite process.

The pictured figure is perceived largely as a line inscribed into formless passages of paint. Thanks to several photographs taken during the painting's protracted making, six of which were published in the Art News essay by Thomas Hess, we have detailed access to some of the work's interim stages. These photographs do not show de Kooning building out a figure, working the canvas up to evermore complete, evermore exacting realization of some preconceived vision or referential content.

Rather, he painted the figure whole several times. Sorry. Occasionally adjusting areas of the canvas before periodically obliterating it almost entirely, the photographs document de Kooning's repetitive practice of drawing and painting directly on the canvas, as well as his even more involved practice of drawing on paper.

These related works on paper include preparatory drawings that de Kooning made concurrently with the painting, as well as tracings of areas of the canvas that he reworked separately. Some of these drawings were cut up and integrated into the canvas for a bit before being removed entirely. Throughout this protracted and laborious practice, de Kooning considered again and again the image of the figure.

In a 1960 conversation with David Sylvester, de Kooning recounted struggling with figuration. He described a kind of comfort or ease that figure drawing and painting provided at first, and that it offered him a composition and ready-made content. He enjoyed the idea that it's got two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a neck.

Despite this initial ease, however, he would lose his way after moving onto the body. Quote, "So I got to the anatomy and I felt myself getting flustered. I really could never get hold of it.

I mean, it kind of almost petered out. I never could complete it," end quote. The drawings and paintings featured in the Janis exhibition all show this faltering and flustered approach to the body, as do figurative works from the earlier series, such as this 1949 painting.

The recursive return to drawing. The obsessive starting over the tracing and pasting of drawn fragments. These all suggest a reluctance or inability to depict the figure as a stable thing.

Rather than viewing de Kooning's irresolute approach as a self-conscious intervention into the history and form of figure painting, scholars have instead more often interpreted it as a sign of de Kooning's own psychological relationship to women, as I've already mentioned. Robert Rosenblum, for example, argued that, like Picasso, de Kooning took, quote, "A psychological approach to the female body," end quote. Updating Picasso's own representations of women as a femme fatale type.

Leo Steinberg argued that although the figure in a painting like "Woman I" may challenge our capacity of recognition, de Kooning captured the female form nonetheless. Quote, "A form that even Adam could have recognized as from an ancient knowledge," end quote. Steinberg was not alone in reading these worked over surfaces as evidence that de Kooning in his emotive approach had tapped into some archaic essence.

William C. Seitz was quite emphatic in this regard, writing, quote, "From the very violence and intentional vulgarity of the image, another woman takes form: a goddess of fertility. Rising from the darkness of the past or the ativistic depths of consciousness, she stands, like an ancient Cybele who drove her lover Attis to madness and castration, a cult image of the eternal female," end quote. One of the reasons I think these quotes are interesting is because they show you how much the reading of gender in these paintings is coming out of the author's own desires, right? De Kooning himself may have encouraged this kind of reading.

To Sylvester, he stated that the Woman paintings had to do with... Okay, I don't want that yet. Had to do with, quote...

I'm sorry. Had to do with, quote, "The female painted throughout the ages, all those idols," end quote. In the same interview, however, he went on to say that the figure, quote, "became a problem of picture making because of the very fact that it had a word connected to it, figure of a woman, made it more precise.

Perhaps I am more of a novelist and a poet. I don't know, but I always like the word in painting, you know," end quote. And I have this up there 'cause the syntax is a little weird.

But he's noting the way in which he's interested in what he calls the figure of a woman. What de Kooning described here is not the eternal female, but something more precise, the naming of woman in picture making. Woman as word then, not just a figure, but the figurative.

De Kooning was speaking to the intertextual and historical context that produced the theme of the woman in the first place, prompting us to think of his paintings and drawings as functioning beyond the morphological and iconographic register at the level of history and symbol. The recursive nature of de Kooning's approach to the figure, both in terms of the many iterations of woman across multiple series, as well as in each individual work as the figure, was scraped away and painted over again and again demonstrates the structural nature of this particular subject matter and the need to anchor it in both historical precedent and social context to maintain its signifying power. Recognizing this contextual approach to figuration is essential to any understanding of de Kooning's treatment of gender.

As his statements demonstrate de Kooning was interested in the figure as it had been well figured in the history of art and culture. The title of the Janis show, "Paintings on the Theme of the Woman," indicates that this interest was present from the very start. De Kooning's frequent quotation of other artists' paintings, Picasso's "Le Demoiselle D'avignon" is often cited, and his use of collage material from commercial advertisements such as the mouth cut from the cigarette advertisement I mentioned earlier are evidence of his interrogation of woman as a figurative representation produced and circulated within a specific social and cultural context.

This figure, which needs to be produced and reproduced to maintain any meaning at all, stands opposed to the simple evocation or expression of woman as psychological content or transhistorical icon. De Kooning's serial and recombinant practice bears this out. And I also just want to call out Charlotte Healy's essay in the catalog, which goes into great detail about this process which was protracted and belabored.

In the many figure studies, de Kooning made prior to and while working on the paintings featured in the Janis exhibition, the figurative enters the image always in the process of construction and at risk of disillusion. Several studies from around 1952 display this tentative and constructive approach to the figure. Like the paintings, these studies show traces of revision in the form of erasing, overdrawing, and cutting and pasting sections of drawings in separate pieces of paper.

The simpler drawings, such as study for "Woman VI" and "Woman," are somehow most demonstrative of de Kooning's method, which it seems began with rather than ending up in a state of revision. Both depict a figure cut nearly in half, the two sections brought together with no attempt at suture. Here, figure is something constructed out of already made fragments, as opposed to a referential hole that the artist manipulated after the fact.

And also something that the exhibition shows is the way in which de Kooning used various techniques of transferring previous drawings for future iterations. And that, again, emphasizes this tendency to need to begin with something that he manipulates rather than working towards something that he has an idea of in his head. When considering de Kooning's figure paintings and drawings, this revisory iterative practice must be kept in mind.

The figure might have been de Kooning's aim, but his elaborate process allows the very idea of figurine to be an always open-ended question, as opposed to a preconceived given. That de Kooning involved and purposefully disrupted the utility of his own body in making these works by, for example, drawing with his eyes-closed, with his non-dominant hand, or with unfamiliar tools, only adds to the open-ended, indeterminate nature of his work. The art historian Richard Schiff and his close attention, not only to the body's de Kooning depicted, but also to the artist's body in action as he was drawing and painting, offered a compelling description of the ambiguous relationship that arose between the depicted and the depicting body.

In his study of de Kooning's art of sense, Schiff relied on the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's distinction between feeling, sensation, and habit, arguing that de Kooning tried to stay with feeling and sensation, a kind of brute sensorial experience, and forestall habit, which absorbed sensation into expectation and wrote action. In this, Schiff understood that de Kooning's works push against the given and the assumed in order to maintain complexity and possibility. Schiff's study of de Kooning's sensations helps to articulate a crucial component of figurine as such.

The way in which it often emerges as a relation between bodies, figuration as relation has been vital to reconsiderations of phenomenology, as it has been taken up by theorists who have revisited its universalizing terms. From Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon to Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler and Gayle Salamon, the figured and the figurative have played an important role in reframing traditional phenomenological concepts such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty's body schema. Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher known for challenging how subjectivity is described in philosophical discourse.

He did this by turning to the language of phenomenology, which is a mode of thinking that relies on the close description of first-person experiences of physically and emotionally moving through the world. Merleau-Ponty used the phrase body schema to consider the body's habitual inhabitation of space. It describes an unconscious confidence in one's ability to move around in the world that comes from one's prior experiences of their body's spatial capacities.

And he describes it that as a capacity or potential. And so as we walk down the halls of the Art Institute, we don't think about where our legs and arms are going because we have, according to people like Merleau-Ponty, the schema that our body are in the habit of moving within. Merleau-Ponty took the concept from the English neurologist, Henry Head, who defined body schema as a standard against which ongoing and emerging bodily movements are measured.

As a standard, the body schema is a kind of diagram, outline, or figure, i.e., schema, we rely on to assure us of our physical capabilities and positioning. And again, you can think about the body schema if you're about to maybe make a jump over some kind of gap, you're thinking about how your body has moved through space in the past and whether you can make that jump. And so it's that sort of retrospective recollection or reliance on that schema that Merleau-Ponty is describing.

Both Fanon and Butler referenced the figuring actions of the body schema, and there are more detailed descriptions of being a particular as opposed to a generic body in the world raised Fanon studied gendered in Butlers. For each, the body schema is established not by a generic subject's past, spatial, and perceptual experiences. It is also, and perhaps primarily, something that results from a specific subject's encounter with others.

Those others, as Fanon most explicitly described, are capable of taking one's habituated inhabitation in the world and supplanting it with something entirely alien, a being constructed by others. And so the well-known example is Fanon's recalling a white child looking at him and saying, "Look, mom, a Negro," and this robs some of his subjectivity. It literally takes something alien and supplants it into his known experience.

And the result is, as Fanon says, nausea, this kind of existential upending of his confidence. According to both Fanon and Butler, this socially constructed body schema forms an imperative for the individual. This is most clear in Butler's engagement with Merleau-Ponty's phenology of perception and proximity to the work that gender does.

"The schema," wrote Butler, "compels, induces, and is obeyed. Figuration as compelled or compulsory at hardly needs saying reduces capacity and reigns impossibility. De Kooning's process-centered figure paintings and drawings might be regarded as functioning between the two points of view out of which the body schema emerges.

His works capture both the disordered experience one has of their own body as it moves in the world and hardly comes into focus as a unified thing. And that fully formed figure that others map onto those discrete movements and into which the first person perspective never fully coheres. De Kooning seemed to reference such an in-between perspective when he told Hess that he was interested in capturing, quote, 'intimate proportions' in his figurative work and was trying to arrive at, quote, 'The feeling of familiarity you have when you look at someone's big toe when close to it or at a crease in a hand, or a nose, or lips, or a necktie,'" end quote.

These details indicate a desire to somehow capture the never fully figured experience of one's own body, but from the second person perspective that imposes figuration, that insists on our ambiguous embodiments conforming to a preexisting culturally produced norm. De Kooning's materially disruptive method both lays bare and resists that final figuring. In her call for a reappraisal of gender issues in de Kooning's work, a project that I share in Fiona Barber moved away from describing de Kooning's worked over figures as violent attacks on female bodies and instead framed the painting's materiality as depictions of, quote, "A body in process, one that is embodied through the slow, additive means of brushstroke on canvas and like all bodies, becoming meaningful through its various representations." Barbara's essay, though it takes a signified woman as a given, does a lot to recuperate these paintings from simplistic readings of them as mere traces of a misogynist mind, which they may very well be.

But they are not only that. They're also complex, obdurately material and uncomfortably ambiguous. De Kooning's own accounts of his Woman paintings only confirm this ambiguity and make clear the artist's doubts about representing gender.

In an off-quoted statement from a 1967 conversation about his figure painting, de Kooning explained, quote, "You can't always tell a man from a woman in my painting. Those women are perhaps the feminine side of me, but with big shoulders. I'm not so big, but I'm very masculine.

And this masculinity mixed up with femininity comes out in the canvas," end quote. This sentiment echoes a previous interview in which de Kooning said, quote, "Maybe in that earlier phase, I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a holy masculine occupation, you know?" end quote.

To deny the material rupture through which the theme of the woman is put in de Kooning's practice is deny the ambiguity that he names in these quotes. It is also to risk falling into the same habits of mine that allow misogyny and heterosexist thinking in general to thrive in that it takes figuring to be inevitable. But de Kooning's practice of masking, revising, appropriating, and serializing first stalls this outcome.

Something that is reflected in his difficulty in knowing when to stop painting. Quote, "I always have a miserable time over it," end quote, he stated. At this point, I wanna jump ahead and pass de Kooning in order to think about, and I'm concluding by the way, in order to think about how a similarly open-ended irresolute practice was taken up by two younger painters in their exploration of identity.

Though here, the identity is in question is less the subject painted and more the subject painting, I've argued elsewhere that the moment of modernist abstraction that de Kooning belongs to is marked by an explicit concern with how an artist shows up in their work, how their intention psychology actions are recorded there, and whether such recording is even possible. I've described this as a concern with authorship, where the very concept of authoring a painting was thrown into question. Much of the monstrous undecideability and ambiguity of expressionism is due to a shared interest in throwing into question just how intent expression psychology can ever be truly tracked in a work of art.

When artists began to focus on the question of authorship and what it even means to have a self-signifying or be signified as having made something, the question of identity of who one is to oneself and to others was necessarily centered. That centering took on a particular valence when critics framed the author, the artist, in relation to a particular identity. In Frankenthaler's case, which you see on the left there, in relationship to her being identified as a woman, and in Sam Gilliam's case on the right there in relationship to his being a Black painter.

Two artists who positioned themselves in relation to late-modernist painting of de Kooning's generation made use of, these two artists rather, made use of the tentative material-based processes to question how their own identities could be tracked in their paintings and accounted for by critics. Frankenthaler has been read ad nauseam as a woman painter. The stains and the pastels read as feminine, but she herself uses line and paint in a way that both shows her intended action, but also uses improvisation and chance as a way to put that action in doubt.

She also used symbolism. She would include letters and words in her paintings, or here, iconographic portrayals of mythological content. This is "Europa." "The Rape of Europa." And including this kind of iconographic content, you can think of this pink area as perhaps Europa and this blue spot as maybe her mouth, indicates the way in which Frankenthaler was interested in the symbolic side of how gender gets mapped into a canvas, as opposed to, again, it's just being, like, an essentialist result of her actions.

In the same way Sam Gilliam used staining as a way, which was highly controlled and technical in his sense, as a way to record his actions and intent in painting. But then when he began to install them in this drape manner, they became completely contingent on the room in which they were displayed for their final form. He did have a diagram for how to hang them, but they were always going to be somewhat dependent on the people who did the hanging.

And in doing this, again, he distanced the painting from his own actions. He places in doubt somewhat his identity as a painter, as it might be read retrospectively by critics. And I can return to this in the Q&A if you want, but I'm rushing 'cause I don't have time.

I just wanna read the final bit. Howardena Pindell can similarly be talked about this way. So, let me conclude.

Sorry. In their delay and denial of the inevitable, de Kooning's figurative works articulate a possibility that figure and gender need not coincide. And painting and its maker and whatever identity that maker is made to inhabit, also need not coincide.

They can be made to come together as the belated naming, describing, and narrativizing of de Kooning's paintings have made clear for some time now. Looking across de Kooning's numerous figurative drawings and paintings, there are certainly moments when the artist himself seemed determined to orient them toward a specific idea of a gendered body, as in those deferred inscriptions of sex in the eyes-closed drawings. But in nearly every case, that orientation is either slow to arrive or interrupted entirely.

Figuration manifests into de Kooning's works as an asymptotic operation, that is an operation that is always tending toward but never arriving at final form. In this, they might be considered to answer Simone de Beauvoir's call to act with existential morality. She issued this call when describing how any given subject can be made to figure in some particular way, that is as race, gendered, sex, et cetera.

De Kooning was, after all, contemporary of both Bourvois and Jean-Paul Sartre and was exposed to their ideas. This particular mode of morality, Beauvoir wrote, demands that existence always be enabled to continue, quote, "its expansion toward an indefinitely opens future," end quote. De Kooning's figure paintings and drawings may not have arrived yet at such an open future, but I feel, through careful looking, the kind of looking I hope I've shown you today, they certainly have the capacity to do so.

Thank you. (crowd applauding) So, we have time for some questions. And if you have a question, I can't really see people really well.

But you can raise your hand, and a staff member is gonna bring a microphone to you. And so you're to wait until you receive the microphone to ask a question. So, I'll give you a moment to process.

We have one down here already.

I'm making my way. Okay.

[Staff] All right, here you go, sir.

Thank you. I had to cling onto your... (laughs) There's a lot to it. There's a lot, yeah.

[Audience Member] But I'm thinking about the drawings of the women in the rowboat.

In the what? In the rowboat. It seems a little, a little disturbing to me, but it's helpful to hear how you describe these drawings. Would he ever...

I don't want to say, "Is he homophobic?" but would he put the male figure in those kind of awkward-

Exposed, open? Yeah.

I don't know. But my response to that is that, you know, what I'm trying to do is push away from questions of what de Kooning thought and to think about what the drawings and paintings do. And they seem to destabilize our assumptions about gender, including the reading of the rowboat figures as women.

And Kevin Salatino has a great essay, as I already said in the catalog, that shows how these two themes get mapped onto each other. So, that often, it's the woman in the rowboat, which is this kind of splade-like figure, transforms into the crucifix figure. And so he seems to move between them quite fluidly.

So, yeah, in terms of like what he thought, I can't answer that for you, but I really think there's some value, and it's a value that I think trans theory has learned a lot from. And just staying with the images a little bit and to thinking about how you yourself assign gender to any of these figures and how the drawings push against that, which is really what I ended up doing at the moment. But thank you for your question.

You have another one down here. They're coming.

[Audience Member] Could you say a bit more about the point you were making about how Simone de Beauvoir's view might have impacted de Kooning or how, at least he reflected them?

Mm-hmm, yeah. So, we're pretty sure that he read Sartre. He was certainly exposed to Sartre and, to some extent, to Beauvoir's thinking.

And this idea of existence being open to an indefinable future, as she says, would certainly be in line with his exposure to existentialism more generally. And I think that's something that doesn't get talked enough about in both Beauvoir and Sartre, is this insistence that we don't view forms being whatever with a kind of, what Beauvoir would call a destiny. And so that, for her, was a way to understand gender.

So to not understand her own body as destined toward, for example, reproducibility. And so I really do see some kinship there. And existentialism was talked about a lot at this moment in the United States.

I see some kinship there in wanting to not settle existence into some singular definable form. And so abstract expressionism in general is just so materially-based, process-based, is striving for that kind of openness. And we recognize that when we look at Paul, like, when we look at maybe de Kooning's abstractions.

His really beautiful abstractions, which I have in here. You see it in... Where he's used a lot of collage and has worked back into paintings.

It's really clear in "Excavation" that these are open-ended and not settling on something. But when we look at his Woman paintings, we don't wanna read them with the same kind of openness. So, does that answer your question a little bit? Somebody over here?

[Staff] There's a question over here.

[Audience Member] I really appreciate your comment on how his paintings are a process. I noticed in parts of the exhibition, it wasn't like oil on enamel. It was matte opaque.

I was wondering if you could explain that a little more or go into that detail there. Is it because of that process? What is that medium? I'm just curious.

Well, he used... I mean, and I think the exhibition's really good at showing this, but he experimented with medium a lot, as did many of his contemporaries. And I mean, Charlotte Healy and I walked through the exhibition a little while ago, and his interest in the different surfaces of the paper that he's using, his using fixative as a medium, that all of these are just ways of experimenting with how a surface is arrived at.

And so I think that all of his figures need to be understood as having gone through that process. So, I don't know if I answered your question, but I would just say that medium is something that's, I think, underdiscussed with de Kooning, the way in which he experimented with medium and how that allowed him to arrive at so many different effects.

[Staff] Got a question right here.

[Audience Member] Hi. Can you discuss that third artist after Frankenthaler and Gilliam? I actually did find that really interesting.

I'm sorry. I was, like, watching the clock and freaking out. So this is Howardena Pindell, a Black woman who was a contemporary of Gilliam.

She was involved in the New York art world. She's an abstract painter. She's also a video artist.

But I understand her use of found materials. She uses the whole punch circles from a whole puncher, I don't know what to call this, to make these beautiful surfaces. She was an office worker, so this is often related to labor.

In this painting, she has numbered them really aggressively. Every single whole punch circle has a number on it. And I think that if you were to look at Pindell or Gilliam or Frankenthaler, you'd be hard pressed to say this is an example of Black art about Blackness, right? Pindell and Gilliam and other, it's Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards, William T. Williams who I'm writing a book about, these are artists who are turning into abstraction for exactly the same reasons that it seems to be at work for de Kooning for the way in which it forestalls that kind of essentialist conversation about identity.

But these seem to me to be very much about labor, both, you know, the labor time of working in the office, but also the ways in which some labor is compensated for, some labor is valued, some labor is devalued.

[Staff] We have a question in center middle here.

[Audience Member] The painting that you spoke about that he worked on for more than a year and a half, and then announced it was finished. And then at the end of your talk, you mentioned the example of something being asymptotic, getting close but never reaching the end. Can you say more about how he knew a work was completed? 'Cause it doesn't seem to be so much evocative as psychological.

Yeah, I mean, he said that was, you know, I can give you the quote of his saying that he always had such a hard time with that. And this is a really good example of it. He not only didn't complete it, but he tried to throw it away.

And then Shapiro was like, "I'd like to see that painting." And he actually, you know, you see this line down the side of it. I mean, one of the few things he did when he returned to it was he expanded the canvas and added this little, I don't know. It's like five inches to the canvas, which just, you know, something so little that he did to it.

We were talking about edges in the paintings today in the paintings and drawings. I think he was just, I think that this is something that really kind of tortured him. His using masking and focusing on edges seems to be a way in which he was kind of working toward or through this idea of a final form.

Is there a final form? But also it's indicative of this generation of painters in general. Is the art happening only in the studio, and then what we put on the walls in the museum is just some material after effect that should be devalued? People were really struggling with this both politically and aesthetically. So, yeah, I would say it's psychological, for sure, but it's also, I would say, it's also political.

You know, what is painting is something that they were struggling with. "When is a painting over?" in a more practical way was something they were struggling with. You know, Pollock notoriously relied on Lee Krasner to know when he was done with the painting.

[Staff] We've got another question in the middle.

[Audience Member] Hello. Study of the "Woman VI," could you put that up?

Sure. Oh. Oh, I'm sorry.

Yes, I see ambiguity in many of these. And I see, in many of the ones, the one you had up previously, I could see elements of male and female. In this one right here, could you point out the elements of femininity in this? Because, to me, I see male.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is why I chose this image. I don't think that one can read gender into this at all, whether female or male.

I mean, I could barely read it into this. And I think that this, again, is, I think, the way in which perhaps you could read gender into the one on the right and not under the one on the left. It's not necessarily to say that the one on the right has resolved itself into gender more.

It just is that we ourselves are sort of willing gender into this because perhaps these look like breasts, not to say that breasts necessarily only belong to women, right? So I think that you are right that it's incredibly indeterminate. And I think that that indeterminacy is also present, say, in "Woman I" in a way that we don't always allow.

[Staff] We'll take a final question in the center here. Could you pass this please?

[Audience Member] Was he affected by Picasso period of Cubism with his drawings?

Was he affected by what? Affected by Picasso.

Oh, Picasso? Cubism.

Yeah, I mean, Picasso was hugely important figure for him. And he, like the people that he sort of learned from, Arshile Gorky and John Graham, really kind of compiled painting out of references to the past, and Picasso was one of the main references. But I also think this generation of artists just struggled with the fact of Picasso, how you deal with that kind of figure in your past, how you compete with that kind of figure in the past and how you break art in a way that Picasso broke art.

But, yes, absolutely, a hugely important figure for him. Okay, thank you. (crowd applauding) (crowd chattering)