Paintings of a woman from Picasso and de Kooning

05-18-2017

Paintings of a woman from Picasso and de Kooning

The painting on the left hand side is Le Rêve (The Dream), by Pablo Picasso in 1932; On the right hand side is Women I, by Willem de Kooning in 1950. Both are large oil paintings on canva. Picasso’s painting is 130cm by 97cm whereas de Kooning’s is much larger, 192cm by 147cm. It is interesting to compare these two paintings by resizing them and putting them together side by side.

Both paintings have the same subject matter of a woman sitting on a chair. Picasso’s woman is sleeping with eyes closed whereas de Kooning’s is fully awaken with eyes widely opened and staring at the viewers. The woman in Picasso’s painting looks charming, smooth and pleasant. The erected penis over her face (or forming a part of her face, depending on how you view it.) may imply sexual activities before she fell asleep. It releases the male dominant view from Picasso. The woman in de Kooning’s painting is menacing, objectifying and violent. She is sitting with her legs and arms open. She is a powerful woman. Unlike male chauvinist Picasso, de Kooning would see women as an equal counterpart of men.

Both women are shown in a style of cubism with distorted depiction. Picasso painted the woman with simple clean outlines whereas de Kooning painted with continual process of scraping paints away and repainting. Both paintings are influenced by Fauvism. Picasso focused on strong contrasted colors whereas de Kooning focused on his gestural brush strokes. Both paintings show the three dimensional figures popping out from the background without employing classical vanishing point technique. Picasso applied warm colors to the woman and the chair, and cool colors to the background windows and curtains. The three dimension view is created by the effect of the warm colored parts popping out and the cool colored parts pushing back in. However, de Kooning employed a different technique to achieve the three dimensional effect. He blurred out the background and created a straight silver band on the right hand side of the painting. It suggests an aluminum door frame behind the woman. As a result, even the woman was not clearly depicted, she is clearly shown popped out from the background.

Picasso once said, “Painting is not made to decorate apartment. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against enemy.” However, when studying these two paintings, I would like to hang Picasso’s painting on my apartment and use de Kooning’s painting as an offensive and defensive weapon against my enemy.