I’m Fine 116

"A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle." -Willem de Kooning Willem De Kooning is probably best known for his paintings of women. He worked on them over a nearly thirty-year period, starting in the early 1940s. At the center of this series was Woman I, a picture de Kooning began in 1950 and completed in the summer of 1952. The picture's process of creation was made famous not only by a series of photographs taken by Rudy Burckhardt, but also by Thomas B. Hess' article "de Kooning Paints a Picture," in which he described the process of the picture's creation as a voyage that involved hundreds of revisions, several abandonments and restarts, and was only completed minutes before the work was loaded onto the truck to go to the gallery.