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Robert Fulford’s Appreciation of Willem de Kooning
(Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 22, 1997)

The New York School was sometimes called Abstract Expressionist, but that term applied to de Kooning only during the Woman series of paintings in the 1950s, when (having established himself as an abstract artist) he returned to the human face and began inserting in his work toothy women drawn from cigarette ads. They were half goddesses, half vampires, women one critic aptly called “Doris Day with shark teeth.” Critics identified the subtext as sexual insecurity, but de Kooning said only that “I began with women, because it’s like a tradition, like the Venus, like Manet made Olympia