Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53, Oil on canvas, 76 1/2 x 49 in. (194.3 x 124.5 cm)
© 2000 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
www.whitney.org

I’ve been thinking about Woman and Bicycle by Willem De Kooning for the past couple of days know, specifically about abstract painting prodding us as viewers to move beyond literal visual experience. I first saw this painting about a year ago at the Whitney Museum during the exhibition Picasso and American Art. I was standing in front of the painting, which is quite big about six feet high, alternating between getting up close and examining the surface with its layers and layers of oil paint, and stepping back to view the canvas as a whole. As I’m moving in to examine a particularly interesting passage slapped on and scrapped with a spackle knife, this older gentleman shoulders me out of the way and asks, “Where is the bicycle? Do you see the bicycle? I can’t see the bicycle! Can you show me the bicycle?” Annoyed I point to areas of the canvas and say here’s the seat, here are the handle bars, there’s one wheel and there’s the other. Frustrated, he said, “I still don’t see it!” and frumped away leaving me in peace to enjoy the painting, to picture in my mind a woman cruising on a bicycle out in East Hampton of Montauk on the east end of Long Island, warm summer breeze blowing through the fields, to forget the Whitney Museum on a dreary winter day in New York City crowded with people fawning over Picasso, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock.

Now looking at the painting we could do a formal analysis and talk about the overlapping planes of color and about how De Kooning compresses the space of the painting and attaches everything to the surface or about how the woman appears to be hanging from the top of the canvas, interesting issues for painters. Or we could psychoanalyze De Kooning and talk about sexual desire, anger and the fierce power of his women paintings. Either way they all seem to miss the point.

The truth is when you look at Woman and Bicycle, you don’t see a woman and a bicycle and you’re not supposed to. This isn’t a photograph or a silent film of a woman riding a bicycle. It’s a painting. The title is only a clue to the inspiration for the painting, a woman riding a bicycle, which was probably something De Kooning say fairly often out in East Hampton. But it captured his imagination, for whatever reason, and the painting is trying to capture ours as well. She beckons us to imagine a woman riding a bicycle on a sunny summer day. To picture it in our minds. To be the woman riding the bicycle. To feel the breeze. The warm sun. To smell the salty air or the cow shit, or the car exhaust, where ever we happen to be riding our bike. When the painting has inspired our imaginations to be the woman on the bicycle the we can see the woman on the bicycle, we see the painting. That is the beauty of abstract painting.