Towards the end of his career de Kooning began experimenting with sculpture. Working with clay, his sense of aliveness and gesture making viscerally relates to his distinctive handling of paint. “Probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had,” according art critic Robert Hughes, looking at de Kooning’s paintings and sculptures the way he immersed himself in the female form in his famous ‘Women’ series from the 50s, and the way the body — admittedly in pieces, but the sensual body nonetheless — returns, over and over again, we can’t help but agree with Hughes. Along with Jackson Pollack, he became a leading member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.

In Greek mythology, the god Zeus disguises himself as a swan and has sexual relations with the unattainable wife of King Tyndareus, Leda, on the same night she laid with her husband. Interpretations vary whether Leda is seduced by the transformed Zeus or if in fact she was raped, as do the suggestions of the product of their union. In some versions of the story, Leda lays two eggs from whence Zeus’ two children, the great beauty Helen and her brother Polydeuces were hatched. In others, it is suggested that Clytemnestra, daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, is deeply troubled by the swan’s assault of her mother. While the myth was not a frequent motif in works of art throughout antiquity, it was adopted in the Renaissance as it gave artists the opportunity to show a woman in the act of copulation without the unacceptable inclusion of a man. Adopted as subject by Paul Cézanne, W. B. Yeats, Hermann Nitsch, and Cy Twombly among countless others.