Made at the height of Willem de Kooning’s revolutionary Woman period, this intimate work captures the artist dismantling figuration itself. Rather than presenting the female body as stable or idealized, de Kooning fractures it into nervous lines, erasures, and violent bursts of color—turning the figure into an unstable collision between desire, fear, beauty, aggression, and abstraction. Here, the body is not painted; it is attacked, revised, and rebuilt in real time.

Works from this period remain among the most important in de Kooning’s oeuvre because they fundamentally altered postwar painting. The Woman series broke from the purity of abstraction that dominated early Abstract Expressionism and reintroduced the figure in a way that felt raw, psychological, and confrontational. This small vellum study is especially revealing: its scale exposes the immediacy of de Kooning’s hand and thought process, where graphite and oil move between drawing and painting almost simultaneously. The work becomes a portrait of postwar instability itself—when identity, gender, image, and culture were all being dismantled and reassembled in modern America.

Alongside Pollock and Krasner, the de Koonings became one of the central figures associated with the rise of the East Hampton artist community.