On the topic of De Kooning, I would like to correct a misapprehension that started out as a feminist move in the politics of contemporary art but has become widely and uncritically accepted, namely that his “Women” series expresses hostility and fear toward that sex. This particular bit of nonsense, which is itself an example of hostility toward art, may have started as a popular response to De Kooning, but has been extrapolated to Picasso, German Expressionism and so on. In art “woman” is a trope for “life,” another word that needs some unpacking—plenty of modern thinkers have shown how vacuous it is, but I don’t intend a vacuous usage. I’m talking about the sex drive as the base, material, objective life function. When knives, chomping teeth and other conventional symbols of castration appear in art, the fear they witness is not caused by or evoked by “woman,” but is summoned out of the social unconscious by the artist’s assertion of the drive, his or her right to live. Our society would prefer to retain the privilege to dispose of our lives, and the hostility that viewers see in De Kooning’s women is that hostility, not his, appearing in the only way it can, also as trope, as figuration. I don’t believe that feminists intended to take the side of power, but their intervention has become a kind of popular wisdom—as such a destructive force. Figures are a battlefield, but no art should be taken literally.
Willem De Kooning, Woman IV 1952-53