Untitled (Nancy de Kooning)

Known for his drawings, paintings and collages featuring comics, American artist Joe Brainard was obsessed with one comic book character in particular: the eight year-old Nancy first drawn by Ernie Bushmiller in 1933. Brainard depicted Nancy in the style of numerous artists including Leonardo Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, and, repeatedly, Willem de Kooning. Here, he pays homage to the abstract, gestural style for which de Kooning is known, placing the recognizable face of Nancy atop a highly abstracted body. Brainard was inspired by Nancy's simple linear composition and the way her figure could easily be adapted to a variety of styles. According to some scholars, Nancy was a proxy for Brainard himself. As a queer man, Brainard was drawn to Nancy's non-essentialist presentation of gender and sexuality, which he explored in series like "If Nancy Was...," depicting the titular character as someone that could be anything. Scholars such as Ramzi Fawaz have also noted the double entendre of the name Nancy, which was a classic epithet for an effeminate man. Through Nancy's many iterations, Brainard probes the construction and malleability of gender representation throughout the history of art.