Visual Art of the decade

With Jackson Pollock, the Dutch-born painter Willem de Kooning is widely credited with the establishment of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant art movement of the 1950s. His Woman I is a ferocious work that engendered praise and controversy from the moment it was exhibited in 1953. The artist had struggled with it for two years and it is a painting that was abandoned rather than finished. It divided critical opinion because some saw de Kooning's use of figuration as a betrayal of abstraction, but it instantly became one of the defining images of the Abstract Expressionism. As he put it, while it seemed ridiculous to paint the figure, at a certain point it seemed more ridiculous not to. His Woman I has been interpreted as a precursor of Pop Art and Neo-Expressionism, and as being crude, vulgar and misogynous. It was also, he suggested himself, "hilarious".