This composition is an early work from de Kooning's long sequence of paintings of women that culminated in one of the most aggressive revisions of the female figure in the art of the twentieth century. The three-quarter-length Seated Woman began as a study for a commissioned portrait that the artist never completed. Instead, de Kooning used the portrait as a vehicle to explore his ongoing interest in amalgamating figurative subjects with the pictorial concerns of abstraction. The beautiful female that de Kooning assembled and disassembled recalls the coolly sensuous women painted by the nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with their tightly fitted bodices, delicate features, and fineness of line. However, the painting's willful anatomical distortions and shifting perspectives are unquestionably related to the recent paintings of the European avant-garde.
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 left arm, for example, is barely hinged to the body and hangs loose, as if pulled out of its socket. The ghostlike pentimenti retain the evidence of previous incarnations of the work and reflect de Kooning's practice of sandpapering his paintings when they were dry to approximate the polished surfaces of Old Master portraits. The high-keyed pinks, blues, purples, reds, aquamarines, and oranges comprise an acidic palette typical of the artist's work of this time, when he
used intense colors to define both space and figure. The hieratic pose, the remote dreamlike stare, and the faint suggestion of a crownlike tiara on the head of de Kooning's voluptuous seated woman suggest the presence of a symbol, like a playing card queen or a model in a magazine, rather than a specific person. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 80.
