Ulrich Birkmaier’s job as senior paintings conservator at the Getty Museum involves painstakingly repairing aging canvases and removing botched varnishes or restorations so artworks can return in full health to public view. He is by profession pretty much the opposite of an art thief.
But in early March he played the role of one. The clean-cut, Munich-born conservator grabbed a box cutter and began to quickly and violently slice a painting from its frame, starting from the top left. When the canvas wouldn’t come free from its backing, he tugged forcefully, creating a pattern of thin cracks running across the canvas. Within minutes the picture was his.
Birkmaier was re-enacting one of the most brazen art heists in recent memory: the 1985 theft in broad daylight of Willem de Kooning’s 1955 painting «Woman-Ochre» from the University of Arizona Museum of Art. In the 1950s, after gaining recognition as an abstract painter, the artist caused a stir with six huge «Woman» paintings that are numbered as such, in addition to several smaller canvases like «Woman-Ochre.» With broad, sometimes slashing brushwork, this series stretched the female figure in grotesque ways, giving her features that include gaping eyes, fang-like teeth and enormous, sagging breasts.
The works were seen as misogynistic by some early on, to the point that de Kooning’s wife, Elaine de Kooning, insisted that she was not the inspiration, but rather that his mother was. The artist did not help his cause by telling a writer in 1956, «Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the ‘Woman’ series».
Olivia Miller, the exhibitions curator at the Arizona Museum of Art, acknowledged the artwork’s aggressive content but also argues that it has acquired a new mystique because of the theft. She even discussed it as a «sacred object» when asked to speak in a religious studies class.
"It became so treasured — the museum wanted it back so badly, and so much time was dedicated to looking at this image and thinking about this image," she said. "He was using traditional techniques to make alarmingly modern paintings, and I think this hybrid quality made people uncomfortable".
Other art historians continue to wrestle with the series’ subject matter, with a long list of feminist scholars discussing the imagery in terms of violence against women. Complicating the issue, Fionna Barber has argued that each painting’s content is not fixed but shifts with different spectators, while Marlene Clark recently published a book, «The Woman in Me,» exploring the Woman portraits as self-portraits.
The Getty exhibition does not address the persisting question of whether "Woman-Ochre" is sexist. "I can see how the painting would have been shocking and maybe still is," Birkmaier said. "But that is well beyond the focus of our exhibition, tracing the material history of this particular painting." He and Learner are its curators, he adds, "but we are not art historians".
original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/arts/design/de-kooning-getty-restoration-theft-art.html https://news.artnet.com/art-world/stolen-willem-de-kooning-returned-1049207