Prisoner of the Seraglio

Women enchanted the brush of Botticelli. Da Vinci is famous for one female smile, Whistler for his mother. Degas captured girlishness from gawky grace to the glamorous fall from it. "So why is it unusual that I paint women?" asks Willem de Kooning, at 60 the foremost U.S. artist still working vigorously in the abstract expressionist idiom.

Women they are, but none of De Kooning's Venuses are ever likely to be zephyred toward shore on a half shell, though it is just possible some of them might have been pushed off a 40-story building. When De Kooning discovered Marilyn Monroe as a subject in the mid-1950s, and long before pop artists cottoned to her contours, he painted her as half Lilith, half maneater, with a pneumatic maw worthy of Kali, the

Hindu goddess of destruction. His newest women are even more tulip-pink tarts, slathering in sensuality and seductive danger (see opposite), and yet they have brought collectors to his doorstep, checkbook in hand.

Building His Dream House. The price De Kooning commands is not negligible. Last month one of his works reached an alltime high auction price of $40,000. With his peers in the abstract expressionist movement either dead, like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, or caught in a price slump, De Kooning finds his reputation still ascending. Last year he became the second painter (after Andrew Wyeth) to receive the President's Medal of Freedom, and presently finds dealers on both coasts bidding and jockeying for the honor of giving him a one-man show.

For all this, De Kooning himself is still not convinced that he is even a good painter. "Art," he likes to point out, "is the thing you cannot make." He still finds it nearly impossible to know when one of his own works is finished. Only when a friend, Painter Philip Guston, cried, "That's it! That's it!" did he stop endlessly revising one large nude. He has carried over the same element of creative indecision-which makes viewers often feel that his moment of supreme victory has been painted over, or else is yet to come--into the dream house that he has been constructing for the past five years near Pollock's old studio at The Springs on the tip of Long Island.

Agape Anatomy. De Kooning's trial-and-error approach to building has so far cost him, by his neighbors' estimate, upwards of $150,000, and he still finds it hard to complete. The askew Y-shaped plan, butterfly roofline and fleshy colors inside echo his predilections in paint. The rhomboid, glass-sided studio reminds him of a loft; his large professional kitchen reminds him of the cafeterias that he ate in most of his life. "Sometimes I think I'm nuts to have started this house," he says. "I'll die before it's finished, maybe. But I like it. Why not?"

De Kooning's house is a tangible way to re-create familiarity around himself. Limited by his own reticence and the lack of a driver's license (like a good Hollander, he bikes everywhere), he has cropped the borders of his world down to introspection. Into that personal space, De Kooning's women intrude like evanescent Eves. He calls them "cousins" of billboard bunnies and film frails, but they also will remind him of a girl who passed by in the street. Where his women of the 1950s were jangling, somber mammas, his new women are harem-scarum voluptuaries, awelter with rouge and agape anatomy. As "action" paintings, they are products of De Kooning's encounter with the sensuous nature of oils. As forms caressed within the bear-hug space of the painter, they seem to be violent valentines, icons to love's agony.

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