The Politics of Feminist Spectatorship and the Disruptive Body

In 1953, Willem de Kooning first exhibited his most famous series of paintings on the theme of the female figure at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Entitled ‘Paintings on the theme of the Woman’, these have since been surrounded by a vast critical discourse, and have acquired a canonical status in histories of modernism. With the unsurprising exception of Clement Greenberg, who saw de Kooning's work at this time as an engagement with the spatial dialectic of late Cubism, many of their initial viewers already perceived their meanings in highly gendered terms ¹ One writer, Andrew Ritchie, who wrote the catalogue entry for de Kooning's showing at the 1954 Venice Bienniale, described them in terms that revealed a clear engagement with the Jungian archetypes so prevalent within 1950s constructions of gender, while simultaneously identifying the Women with violence and destruction: ‘de Kooning's Eves, Clytemnestras, Whores of Babylon, call them what you will, have a universality, an apocalyptic presence that is rare in the art of any time or any country’. ² This frame of reference was later reinforced by de Kooning's own comparisons of the Women to Mesopotamian statuary, and to his claim in 1956 that ‘maybe I was painting the woman in me’. ³ The feminist art history which emerged subsequently in the 1970s was also to make specific links between these paintings and actual violence against women, an attribution which, in effect, set the limits of a discourse by identifying areas which were neither desirable nor indeed permissible for feminist spectatorship. What I want to do in this essay is to challenge these limits through the premise that, rather than being static or predetermined, meaning in visual culture is something continually enacted through the operations of art historians, critics, and other interested viewers. Interpretation, in this view, becomes an ongoing, performative process. ln this case, my exploration initially takes the form of an investigation of a formative moment in the body of this criticism, before moving on to suggest other possible ways of reading images such as Woman I. (Plate 8.1).