Through their material practice, Abstract Expressionist artists William De Kooning (1904-1997) and Jackson Pollock (1912-1954)

challenge “what the tradition of the figure means in an art world that has turned to abstraction”1, and the role of the audience in
enforcing this significance. To challenge the artistic assimilation of the infantile, maternal and sexual in the Western nude, they draw
on personal experiences of the family dynamic within the social context of the 1940’s in the sophisticated abstraction of the human
figure, as with De Kooning’s Women (1942) and Pollock’s Untitled (1945). Both artists also attempt to break down the “cartesian
opposition between the mind and body”2 in their development of a style of material automatism known as Abstract Expressionism;
in a shift away from the “fixed and stable [representations of the] Cartesian Body”3, they expressed the need to “reevaluate the
body as a viable component of human experience [in] response to a profound cultural crisis”4 of the collapsing ideological
systems—economic, political and philosophical—post Great Depression World War II, through gestural painting in De Kooning's
Woman I (1942) and Pollock's Untitled (1938-41).

In the transformation from conceptual to material practice, artists draw on their personal and social context to create systems of
meaning. It is through these frameworks that Pollock and De Kooning are able to transform abstract ideas into sophisticated works
of art that challenge the role of the female nude in contemporary society. De Kooning, influenced by the materials of an
adolescence spent painting houses and a fraught Oedipus-like relationship to his mother, draws on the cultural objectification of the
pinup-girl to express the conceptual shift away from the Cartesian body and towards the
production of art that instead challenges the role of the infant, maternal, and sexual through the
grotesque materials and nude body of Woman. Despite his classical training, De Kooning's shift
towards abstraction followed naturally from the Surrealist shift away from traditional Western
frameworks of meaning, moving towards the creation of a framework that could "contain the crisis
of the [postwar] period". Woman, the first of seven portraits in De Kooning’s Women series,
depicts a nude female in child-like colours and messy brushstrokes, dissected by black linework
that places emphasis on the sexual and reproductive organs of the female. In this way, he
associates the body with the juvenile, maternal and sexual concurrently to challenge their overlap
in cultural and cartesian representations of the female figure. The artist evokes the juvenile
through his ‘sea of bright colours and violent brushwork’5 , translating his revulsion at the
evocation of the infantile alongside the nude onto the work through the smears of grey skin-tones
to transform the work into one of challenging malaise. The connotation of aggression across the
palette, with De Kooning ‘handling pink and red paint as if he were a wrestler or a rapist attacking
resistant flesh” 6 links the infantile with the brutal, challenging the dismissal of the feminine by
posing it as the ugly genesis of life. In contrast, the association between the nude and the
maternal through the caesarean-like gash across her stomach is both “about what the tradition of the figure means in an art world
that has turned to abstraction” 7 and a gesture through which De Kooning transforms the idea of association between sex,
motherhood and childhood into a work of art that challenges the Oedipal maternal relationship. Drawing on the rise of the
fetishisation of pinup girl in popular culture, the artist has cut “the grin” 8 from a cigarette magazine and adhered it to the mouth of
the subject, in effect, silencing her. In a final act of aggression, De Kooning transforms the idea of challenging aestheticism and
sexualisation, “constructing that body for us, but he’s also refusing to allow it to exist in any coherent way”. Through accessing
Western and Cartesian representations of the nude in his conceptual practice, De Kooning utilises semiotics, violent brush-strokes
and garish materials to transform the body into a work of art that challenges the role of nudity in modern society.

It was this desire for the transgression of the traditional that inspired Pollock's Untitled
(1945), wherein he drew on the material practice of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, and
a childhood spent with Indigenous Americans to establish a framework of semiotic
abstraction through which he transformed the human figure into an amorphous work of art
that challenged the role of Cartesian bodies and ideologies in modern society. The
conceptual influence of his boyhood in North America—evidenced materially by the
animalistic forms and ritualistic rhythm invoked by the angular line work—connects his
infancy to the isolated female torso about which the other convoluted figures on the page
move. This act invokes themes of maternity and sexuality, the figure identifiable only by
her breasts and pubic region, so developing an association between the infant boy and the
sexualised woman that is extended through his perversion of the male genitalia to capture
the gamut of social engagement with the nude. An abstraction of the representation of the
phallic in classical works, such as Leonardo DaVinci's (1452 - 1519) Vetruvian Man (1490),
was applied to the construction of Untitled to reiterate the correlation between the child-like
imagery of genitalia and traditional renderings of austerity in nudity, challenging the male
objectification of the mother and their child. Drawing on the personal, cultural and
Cartesian, Pollock uses his material practice to transform ideas of infancy, maternity and
sexuality into sophisticated works of art that challenge the burgeoning vulgarity of male
representations of sexual expression through semiotic references.
1 Dr. Steven Zucker, Willem De Kooning, Woman, I, 2017
2 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, 1968, p. 113.
3 Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body, Philosophical and Cultural interpretations, 1998
4 Leesa Fanning, Abstract Expressionism and the Body, Philosophical and Cultural interpretations, 1998
5 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, 1968, p. 102.
6 Robert Rosenblum, The Fatal Women of de Kooning and Picasso, Art News, Oct. 1985, p.100.
7 Dr. Steven Zucker, Willem De Kooning, Woman, I, 2017
8 Willem De Kooning, xxxx, xxxx
Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, inspired by the conceptual practice of the mid-twentieth
century, used expressionist materials and burgeoning techniques like action painting and procedural art to associate the movement
of the artist’s body inherently with the final artwork. In this way, ‘the rhythm, movement, gesture and energy of the artists body…
become the content of the art itself, recorded on the canvas” 9, so that each artist “conflates the deconstruction of the represented
body with the enactment of violence on the bodies of actual women” 10 to create a work of art that challenges the role of the
audience in the material violence. The audience begins to assume the artist’s relationship to the subject, manipulated by the
material practice of De Kooning and Pollock within Woman I and Untitled, to challenge the modern audience in sophisticated works
of art that involve both the body of the female subject and the male artist.

Pollock's material practice of action painting in the stratified linework and deep shadows of Untitled
(1928-41) situate the bodily movement of the artist—both materially and conceptually—between the
subject and audience, so that viewers must first assume his role before they are able to engage with
the female nude. In this way, Abstract Expressionists are able to transform movement into
sophisticated artworks that challenge the dominant relationship between audience and body, with
viewers assuming the role of both witness and perpetrator within perverted scenes of sexual
violence. The conceptual proximity between subject and audience is made material by Pollock in his
use of scale, amorphous animalism, chiaroscuro and cohesive texture, to make a lucid scene
almost inaccessible. At just 36.2 x 25.4cm, Pollock urges audiences to move closer to the body,
proxemics now a signifier of the audience-body relationship. “The dissolution of the body as a
self-contained figural form and the blurring of the distinct figure/ground relationship” 11 through
Pollock’s uniformly dark shadows and cohesive material practice draw audiences closer into the
scene, demonstrating how conceptual questioning can be translated into works of art that challenge
the role of the audience through materiality. Pollock’s practice of abstracting of the semi-human
form forces audiences to assume a position of unfamiliarity with the faceless subject. Thus, Pollock
establishes the role of the audience as a spy, unwelcome to the private sensuality of the intertwined nude figures, furthered by the
absence of a face to guarantee a connection cannot be made on a personal level between viewer and subject. By placing
audiences in such a position, they have both power over the nude—forcibly bearing witness to the sexual scene—and are unable to
establish themselves within the spatio-temporal realm of the semi-naked figure. The beast-like form, distinctly reminiscent of a
mating animal in the bovine leg about the waist of the central figure, asserts itself over the subject whilst illiciting notions of rape-
violence audiences are both responsible for in their assumption of the role of the artist, and powerless to stop in their imposter-like
removal from the activity of the scene. Pollock’s material practice of abstraction in the delineation of the animalistic and amorphous
nude alongside abstract expressionist movements challenges the role of the viewer as both witness and perpetrator, audience and
artist, questioning complacency around the perversion of art.

De Kooning's material practice of procedural art, eye contact, and scale in Woman I associate
the body of the artist and audience to the sexuality and violence of the female nude in
conceptual art. As a piece of procedural art, the subject repeatedly built up and carved down
over a period of three years, the brushstrokes evident on the surface of the work maintain a
sense of urgency, with the colours blending and smudging across the canvas. By maintaining
the independence of each violent stroke, audiences must experience his own bodily
movements to engage with the female form itself. De Kooning forces viewers to assume the
role of perpetrator, the material violence of his practice extending conceptually to the treatment
of women to challenge the bystander as they become pseudo-artists. With particularly long
and expressive strokes in the outline of Woman I's shoulders, breasts, and the hand that sits
over her pubic region, the artist's aggressive bodily movements through which audiences
engage with the subject’s body become sexual, imposing upon them a relationship to the
subject that mirrors that of the artist to challenge a cultural sense of isolation from artistic
scenes. Against her abstracted form, the subject’s eyes are stark in their clarity and simplicity.
With minimal strokes, the artist gives the traditionally-powerless subject a frame of
engagement through which she asserts herself over audiences. This subversion of Cartesian
power dynamics is extended through the larger-than-life depiction of the seated figure, by
which De Kooning gives power to the nude subject to transform the relationship between artist, audience and subject into one of
reciprocity. No longer is the audience comfortable in a space of detached affection; assuming the role of an artist, violently
outlining—as thought to caress—the nude in front of them, audience's must now confront the challenging notion that the subject
may want them back.

Using evidenced mark-making and personal systems of semiotics, Abstract Expressionist artists translate the conceptual
exploration of the role of the nude and the body of the artist in modernist culture into challenging works of art that question the
necessity of realism, as with William De Kooning’s Woman and Woman I, and Jackson Pollock's Untitled and Untitled.

9 Amelia Jones, Performing the Body, Performing the Text, 2013

10 Fionna Barber, “Abstract Expressionism and Masculinity’, in Paul Wood ed., Varieties of Modernism, Open University with
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004, pp.144-186.
11.Jayne Wark, Comptes-rendus de livres Book Reviews