On the painting of Willem de Kooning...
"The female genital symbolizes creativity and de Kooning, in painting woman, is painting creativity, and when he can no longer paint woman, he loses his creativity, or else goes through the motions of being creative. His postwoman works are pseudocreative rather than authentically creative.
When the female genital becomes totally manifest - oppressively evident, confronting and overwhelming the viewer with the self-evidently female - the female body has almost completely disappeared: The female figure has itself been almost completely overwhelmed by the sign of itself - the most vital fact of its authenticity, the smallest but most significant part of its femaleness. Totally exhibitionist, the female body dissolves - into its roots, as it were. One can understand this an example of locker-room irony, and there is no doubt such an unflinching disclosure of the usually obscure 'mystery of life,' and even more heroically as a militant, fearless, in-your-face revelation of the unconsciously terrifying intimate reality of the female body. De Kooning is a Perseus who uses painting as a mirror in which to stare at the Medusa - the female genital, surrounded by its snaky roots - and not turn to stone."
Donald Kuspit Venus Unveiled: De Kooning's Melodrama of Vulgarity in
Uncontrollable Beauty - Toward a New Aesthetics Ed Bill Beckley (1998) p.285