 Woman, 1944 belongs to de Kooning's first series of women, begun about 1940. Like other works in this series, the colors are raucously bright — jarring hues of green, ocher, blue, and orange — and the imagery is tenuously balanced between realism and abstraction. An awkwardly posed, somewhat grotesquely formed female figure is broadly painted without modeling. The parts of her body are reduced to independent abstract shapes and lines, as is the spatially flattened environment in which she exists. Her comical, masklike face, with smiling bow-shaped lips and large bulging eyes, adds to the light air of the picture. Although de Kooning's image is recognizable as a woman, the emphasis is on the abstract arrangement of form, line, and color.
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