Interchange

Interchange enacts an exchange between seeing a body and seeing a city. The central pink‑flesh shape, edged by black arabesques and capped with a green‑and‑white contour, nearly locks into a seated silhouette; in the next instant, it surrenders to the push of scaffold‑like lines and a red, doorway‑shaped frame on the right. De Kooning’s black, calligraphic network parcels the surface into shards that read like a city grid or construction rigging, while the mustard swathes stream diagonally across the canvas like lanes of traffic or torsos in motion. The scraped passages—dry‑rubbed whites, planed yellows, and reworked blues—expose earlier gestures and make duration legible, so that time is laminated into paint. This is not ornament; it is the work’s argument that perception in modern life is provisional and revised, a constant interchange between momentary readings and their undoing ²³. De Kooning’s spatial gambit rejects a simple binary of figure versus abstraction. As Elderfield observes for this period, boundaries of the figure compress into curving planes that become the composition’s true building blocks; surface and space cover and reveal one another in alternating pulses ². Interchange embodies that pulse. The red marks—some like drips or wounds stung into the yellow masses—operate as urgent signposts within the field, directing the eye toward junctions where forms buckle and reroute. Ladder motifs at right and faint grid tracings across the picture hint at urban ascent and partition, but they never settle into fixed symbols; they are indices of process and place rather than icons, a semiotic openness consistent with mid‑1950s canvases like Easter Monday, where transfers and facture invite multiple readings ³⁴. Even the skull‑like shape in the lower right, nestled against a scraped blue‑white corner, functions less as stable memento mori than as a flicker of mortality inside the rush—an interpretive lure rather than established iconography. Materially, the picture declares how it was made. Oil is dragged thin, then loaded thick; lines are scored, erased, and redrawn; chroma oscillates between hot reds/pinks and cooler blues/whites. This scrape‑and‑repaint rhythm, documented across de Kooning’s mid‑1950s practice, is not just technique—it is theme ². It models a city that is simultaneously constructed and demolished, an environment of detours and overlays in which the viewer’s attention becomes the traffic. Within this matrix, the lingering “Woman” is not a portrait but a pressure: the sense that flesh persists inside landscape and that urban space remains tactile, paint as flesh, even when it looks infrastructural ². As a result, Interchange recasts Abstract Expressionism as a problem of spatial construction and perception rather than pure gesture. It stages the modern subject’s oscillation between interior feeling and exterior scene, anchoring a pivotal turn in de Kooning’s career from the explicit figuration of the early 1950s to the abstract urban landscapes of 1955–56—a turn that decisively shaped postwar painting’s possibilities ¹²³.