This portrait signals the beginning of a long series of paintings by Willem de Kooning that culminated in one of the most aggressive revisions of the female figure in the art of this century. Here De Kooning’s struggle to redefine the female form is presented explicitly in the painted outlines and charcoal underdrawing and overdrawing that emphasize the artist’s rearrangements, particularly of arms and legs. The intense greens, blues, pinks, and oranges comprise an acidic palette typical of De Kooning’s work of this time. The woman is seated before a thin table within an environment of sufficient flatness and spatial ambiguity to recall the ancient Pompeian murals that De Kooning often visited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. By veiling the woman’s face with layers of paint atop a wide, unfocused stare and bared teeth, De Kooning keeps the sitter at an unbridgeable distance from the viewer in both space and time. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 326.