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Born: 1918
Died: 1989
Summary of Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning was a vibrant and giving woman who pushed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism with her carefully painted and lively portraits of friends, athletes, and even the President of the United States. During the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement and beyond, she was a prolific artist, art critic, portraitist, and instructor. In most of her work, de Kooning combined abstraction with representation, drawing influence from bullfights, sculpture, and cave paintings, among other things.
Elaine’s artistic breadth, wide understanding of media, and impact on fellow artists were evident, despite her early career being eclipsed by that of her husband, Willem de Kooning. Elaine de Kooning’s work continues to gain critical acclaim and a position among her New York School contemporaries.
De Kooning embraced the principles of Action Painting, not just in terms of painting in a gestural technique, but also in terms of wanting to immerse herself in and empathise with her subject. While she did create abstract canvases, much of her art is based on the everyday realities of her existence.
De Kooning’s portraiture was less concerned with capturing precise likenesses than traditional portraiture, preferring instead to convey the person’s style, the characteristic that makes him or her instantly identifiable to friends and acquaintances. A recognisable visage emerges from a swirl of expressive brushstrokes, and one senses the portrait tradition being reinvigorated.
Her portrayal of male sexuality questioned modern gender power relations and masculine privilege by upending the more normal scenario of male artist and female subjects. Her insistence on having an open relationship with her husband, as well as her heavy drinking and smoking, went against conventional expectations of what it meant to be a wife at the time.
Childhood
Elaine de Kooning was born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918 (although she subsequently claimed she was born in 1920). Her parents were Marie and Charles Frank Fried, a factory manager for the Bond Bread Company. She was the first of four children, and her family lived in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay area. Marjorie, Elaine’s younger sister, once recalled that their mother was not the most attentive or loving parent, but that she instilled a love of the arts in her children by frequently taking them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Broadway shows, and by decorating their walls with art reproductions.
Elaine was definitely the darling of their mother. Marie’s nickname for her oldest daughter, according to an old acquaintance of Elaine’s, was “Samson,” after the Old Testament hero who was given tremendous power by God. Marie was a strange and brilliant woman who wore unkempt attire and wore a lot of cosmetics when she walked about town. When the police came to the Fried house in the late 1920s, a neighbour had denounced Marie for neglecting her children, and Marie had to be forcefully removed from the property. For a year, she was committed to Queens Village’s Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, where the children’s primary caretaker was their maid.
Early Life
De Kooning enrolled at Erasmus Hall High School in 1932, where she excelled in almost every subject, including athletics and academics. She enrolled at Hunter College in Manhattan four years later, but dropped out after just a few weeks of courses.
Following his departure from Hunter, de Kooning enrolled in seminars at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on 3rd Avenue and 34th Street, where painters employed by the New Deal-funded Works Progress Administration taught. She met artist Robert Jonas in the da Vinci School, with whom she had a brief relationship and stayed friends throughout her life.
De Kooning became politically engaged while attending the Leonardo da Vinci School, representing the school at meetings of the Marxist John Reed Club. She sought to unite students into a new auxiliary organisation for artists, simply known as the Artists’ Union, at these meetings. She also met artist Milton Resnick, who was representing the American Artists School, during the John Reed Club gatherings. Soon after, Resnick and de Kooning began dating, and she dropped out of Leonardo da Vinci to join in studies at American Artists, where modernist Stuart Davis and Social Realist Raphael Soyer both taught.
Mid Life
Robert Jonas introduced her to Willem (Bill) de Kooning, a 34-year-old Dutch emigrant, in the fall of 1938, although there is no indication of a love connection during their first meeting. At the time, Elaine was living with Resnick, who allegedly told her, “Bill is going to be the greatest painter in the country.”
A friend of de Kooning’s drove her to Willem’s studio shortly after their meeting. Elaine said later in adulthood, “It was the cleanest environment I had ever seen. It had painted grey flooring, white walls, one table… one easel, one fabulously fine phonograph that cost $800 when he was only making $22 a week, and one man painting on the easel.” Willem offered Elaine sketching classes shortly after they met, which she accepted. De Kooning eventually sold her first piece, a watercolour, for $10 in late 1938.
De Kooning travelled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, with a friend and art enthusiast, Bill Hardy, in the fall of 1945, much to the dismay of her husband, who had become a prominent artists’ colony in recent years. When De Kooning returned to New York in December of the following year, she and Bill were evicted from their apartment on 22nd Street. The two moved into an apartment on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village that had previously been rented by Milton Resnick. Bill and Elaine positioned their easels in opposing corners of the small studio, heightening the tension between the two of them.
De Kooning specialised in portraiture throughout the 1940s. “Everything was a matter of tension between objects or edges and space,” she said of some of the first painting skills she received from Bill, “Everything was a matter of tension between objects or edges and space.” Her early self-portraits show her reclining in her studio, sketchbook in hand, surrounded by the things in her studio. Bill and other pals, including Joop Sanders, were also asked to appear for photographs. De Kooning was less concerned in painting exact replicas and more interested in capturing her sitter’s demeanour – the way one knows a friend coming down the street before ever seeing their face.
Elaine and Bill’s paintings were included in the Sidney Janis Gallery’s 1949 show Artists: Man and Wife, which also featured the work of couples such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The renowned Artists’ Club (or Eighth Street Club) was founded at 39 East 8th Street the same fall. Elaine was a vocal participant in group debates from the outset, even though she did not become an official member until 1952.
De Kooning’s paint handling becomes considerably more expressive in the 1950s, and her portraits take on a gyroscopic quality. She produced portraits of her friends Fairfield Porter (1954) and Harold Rosenberg (1955), as well as a series of sportsmen, notably the quasi-impressionist abstract Baseball Players (1953). (1956). Her passion in male portraiture threw the traditional depictions of males into disarray. “I became fascinated by the way men’s clothes divide them in half – the shirt, the jacket, the tie, the trousers,” De Kooning stated. I just used a few stylised postures for this project. Some guys sit with their knees crossed and their arms clasped over their chest. Others are completely uninhibited.
De Kooning’s first solo exhibition, at the Stable Gallery, in 1954, received mixed reviews. According to the New York Times’ art critic, “Mrs. de Kooning’s shape is prone to frittering away in a flurry of abrasive brushstrokes; yet, because she possesses exceptional observational skills and is an outstanding draughtsman, the essential coherence of her figures is retained. These figures are shrunk and shown in intense movement, struggling and straining in the style of El Greco saints in the basketball themes. However, the true energy of her art is suffocated by her use of constantly bleak hue.”
De Kooning established herself as one of America’s leading painters by working and teaching beyond the shadow of her more renowned husband. She was commissioned by the White House to paint President John F. Kennedy’s portrait in 1962, an honour not typically bestowed upon an artist identified with the bohemian avant-garde. De Kooning spent the greater part of 1963 fine-tuning the picture, gathering hundreds of images of Kennedy, and doing short-hand drawings of him whenever he appeared on television, after sketching him for a few weeks in Palm Beach, Florida, at the end of 1962.
Late Life
Following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, de Kooning took a year off from painting to teach at the University of California, Davis. De Kooning began lecturing at universities and colleges across the country in the mid-1960s, including Yale University, Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and the New York Studio School. She started experimenting with other mediums as well, producing a series of fourteen bronze sculptures.
De Kooning purchased a studio on Long Island near Bill in 1969, and in 1976, she was named the Lamar Dodd Visiting Professor of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens. De Kooning became resolved to stop drinking after years of excessive drinking and carousing, and after making the commitment to commute daily between Georgia, New York City, and East Hampton, she persuaded Bill to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as well. While the two reconnected in the mid-1970s, it wasn’t a passionate rekindling because Bill was madly in love with another lady; rather, it was a pragmatic arrangement as Bill’s health began to deteriorate.
De Kooning travelled and taught throughout the 1980s, visiting Egypt, Kenya, China, and Japan, as well as regular visits across Europe and the United States. These journeys influenced the tone, composition, and topics of her later paintings, sketches, and etchings, which are probably her best work. Her trips also inspired her to produce a number of paintings, watercolours, and collages that mimic old cave art, many of which she saw while travelling. These Cave Walls and Cave Paintings (1983) were lighter in tone and constructed with thinner, almost minimalist brushstrokes than her earlier work.
De Kooning had one of her lungs removed in 1987 after being diagnosed with lung cancer years earlier. Her condition deteriorated further, and she died on February 1, 1988. In the Hamptons and at Cooper Union, several memorial ceremonies were organised. Willem de Kooning, who had developed severe dementia by this time, was never notified of his wife’s death.
Fortunately, Elaine de Kooning’s legacy has received increased attention in recent years, thanks to an exhibition of her portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the inclusion of several of her paintings in the 2016 Denver Art Museum exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism. Her 1960s abstract expressionist works are big, bright, expressive, and her sensitive and energetic portraits of friends, athletes, and strangers broaden our knowledge of what Abstract Expressionism may be.
Famous Art by Elaine de Kooning
Self-Portrait #3
1946
In the mid-1940s, De Kooning painted numerous self-portraits, and this one in the National Portrait Gallery is one of the most complete. The artist is seated in a chair, clutching a sketchbook, and looking directly at the audience. A decanter, a tiny sculpture, a hanging cloth, a postcard, and a plant are among the items in her studio. Near her feet, a cup of coffee and an ashtray sit on the floor. The incorporation of these artefacts transforms the painting into a still life study rather than a portrait, and may remember her early training with Willem (Bill) de Kooning, who insisted on studying from still lifes.
John F. Kennedy
1963
When de Kooning went to West Palm Beach, Florida, in December 1962 to paint Kennedy’s portrait, she said the president was difficult to sketch because he “extreme restlessness … he read papers, talked on the phone, jotted down notes, crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted from one arm of the chair to the other.” When de Kooning returned to New York City, she worked nonstop for over a year, drawing and re-sketching Kennedy from her initial conceptions as well as hundreds of newspaper articles and other pictures.
Desert Wall, Cave #96
1986
Elaine de Kooning explored a series of Paleolithic caverns in Lascaux, France, in the early 1980s. De Kooning began her Cave Work series, which includes this 1986 painting, after being inspired by what she saw within. Atop streaks of mauve, blue, crimson, and purple, faint silhouettes of horses, antelopes, and buffalo intermingle and overlap. “The cave painters took tremendous liberties with proportions,” she told one reporter in a particularly enlightening moment.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Elaine de Kooning was a vibrant and giving woman who pushed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism with her carefully painted and lively portraits of friends, athletes, and even the President of the United States.
- During the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement and beyond, she was a prolific artist, art critic, portraitist, and instructor.
- In most of her work, de Kooning combined abstraction with representation, drawing influence from bullfights, sculpture, and cave paintings, among other things.
- Elaine’s artistic breadth, wide understanding of media, and impact on fellow artists were evident, despite her early career being eclipsed by that of her husband, Willem de Kooning.
- Elaine de Kooning’s work continues to gain critical acclaim and a position among her New York School contemporaries.
- De Kooning embraced the principles of Action Painting, not just in terms of painting in a gestural technique, but also in terms of wanting to immerse herself in and empathise with her subject.
- While she did create abstract canvases, much of her art is based on the everyday realities of her existence.
- De Kooning’s portraiture was less concerned with capturing precise likenesses than traditional portraiture, preferring instead to convey the person’s style, the characteristic that makes him or her instantly identifiable to friends and acquaintances.
- Her portrayal of male sexuality questioned modern gender power relations and masculine privilege by upending the more normal scenario of male artist and female subjects.
- Her insistence on having an open relationship with her husband, as well as her heavy drinking and smoking, went against conventional expectations of what it meant to be a wife at the time.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
