Unlike the majority of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, De Kooning often retained a figurative element to his work, and there are interpretations and reflections of nature even in his great abstract series of ‘Untitled’ works from 1977, considered his best year and when his top price at auction of $66million was painted. De Kooning executed very many works in the late 1940s, through the 1950s and early 1960s with the word ‘Woman’ in the title. The top price at auction for such a title is over $19m, for an oil just 28 x 20 inches, and the top 7 prices for any work on paper, starting at $6.4m for a work 8 x 6 inches, are for those with ‘Woman’ in the title.
He already had an established career when he started on his Woman series. These paintings, of buxom, vampish females, knotted up in swathes of abstraction, took detours from earlier ladylike forms into a new and violent direction. “If the facial and anatomical distortions of these figures reveal a kinship with Picasso’s famous series of paintings of Dora Maar, de Kooning’s handling of the figure within the space is far more fluid and energized than the rational geometry of Picasso’s Cubist interior spaces,” Judith Zilczer writes in her Phaidon book.

This work is related to the commission of a mosaic for the Clinica Pediatrica dell’Universita di Padova. From what presumably started as a visualisation of the work in situ Severini has created a presentation work that is altogether more beautiful and interesting. The mosaic floats in an ambiguous space, slightly away from the walls and behind two brutalist pillars that are stylistically in keeping with the architecture of the Clinica Pediatrica though not literal depictions. Indeed, the work eschews literalness and is a striking and detailed depiction of the mosaic thrown into relief against the neutral colours and anomalous space of its intended setting.