(lively piano music) Voiceover: We're on the
fourth floor of MoMA, looking at Willem de Kooning's
"Woman I" from 1950-52. Voiceover: Is there a "Woman II?" Voiceover: There is, and a III, and "Woman and Bicycle"
and "Marilyn Monroe," and it's a whole series. Voiceover: Whole series. Voiceover: Of his return to the figure. De Kooning had been trained
in, where was it, Rotterdam? Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: And he trained as a
traditional classical artist, that figure was really important to him. Before this, he had done a whole
series of abstract paintings, and this was really his return. Voiceover: She's really ugly-looking. Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: Hard not to
see this as misogynist. Voiceover: Yeah, yeah. Voiceover: Yeah, that's usually
people's first reaction. to make that interpretation. Voiceover: But what justifies
the interpretation first? You've got an emphasis on ... Voiceover: Her breasts. Voiceover: On her breasts, on her eyes, on her mouth, on her legs. Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: But she is also
skull-like, and she's also disfigured, Voiceover: And there's male gestural marks all over the female body. Voiceover: My favorite museum text panel talked about de Kooning
as a muscular painter. Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: And I just stood here
and made this gesture of ... Voiceover: He really does
push paint around wonderfully, but it does have an aggressive kind of ... This is the origin of the term
"action painting" really, right? Voiceover: Yeah. It looks that way. Voiceover: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Rosenberg was
one his great defenders, the critic, Harold Rosenberg. There had been a whole bunch of readings, and this painting is so layered. First of all, basically,
it's physically layered. De Kooning was at a moment in his career when he was not really thinking
that he would be selling these figurative paintings. What he was doing was
he was painting on them until they would begin to fall apart. That is, he just worked them and
worked them and worked them to death, and then he would wipe them down and
start over again on the same canvas. Voiceover: Just as a
place to work out ideas. Voiceover: According to some
of his friends at this time, this canvas had some 60, 70,
maybe even 80 paintings on it. Voiceover: Wow. Voiceover: Before,
apparently, he was convinced - of course this is the telling
of one of his friends - that he should stop and let the
painting be and change canvases. But this is a painting that's also
layered not only in terms of the paint, but it's also layered in terms of
the way in which people look at it. Some people read it as really misogynist, and then some people say no, no, no, this is a more critical look
at the post-World War II pinup, the culture of, the beginning
of our culture of pornography, of the acceptance of pornography and
the way that women are represented. It sounds a little
apologist to me, but ... Voiceover: Well, I think it's easy to ... It's a little too easy to say when an
artist makes a female figure who looks ... When a male artist makes a female
figure who looks, to our eyes, as ugly, Voiceover: That it's an anti- ... Voiceover: ... misogynist. Voiceover: And it's probably
a good idea not to do that because for example, that
charge is leveled to Degas, and I don't think he was misogynist in the way that those images
are interpreted at all. Voiceover: Yeah. Perhaps more racist, perhaps
more classist (laughs). Voiceover: Or just breaking away
from certain ideas of the nude. Voiceover: Oh absolutely. So is that what's happening here then? Voiceover: Well, I don't know. in a sense, reinvent the way that we can begin to depict the body? Voiceover: He's a little
bit "Venus of Willendorf-y." Voiceover: She is. Voiceover: But at the
same time, curiously, even as it's sculptural on that sense, it's also a kind of
calligraphic figure, right? I mean it's really rendered with
this incredibly wonderful line. (lively piano music)