Elaine de Kooning

Elaine de Kooning (born March 12, 1920, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died February 1, 1989, Southampton, Long Island, N.Y.) was an American painter, teacher, and art critic who is perhaps best known for her portraits.

A precocious young artist with a competitive streak that found an outlet in sports, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and briefly attended Hunter College before transferring to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. In 1938, an instructor there introduced her to Willem de Kooning, whose paintings enthralled her. He began tutoring her in the close observation of objects that he had learned in a Dutch art academy before immigrating to the United States. Married in 1943, the de Koonings would never divorce, despite numerous infidelities on both sides. Elaine left Willem in 1957 to live on her own but returned to his side in the mid-1970s, when he was in the throes of severe alcoholism.

De Kooning spent the summer of 1948 at Black Mountain College, the famed experimental school in North Carolina, where she was the set designer for John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s production of Erik Satie’s Le piège de Méduse (The Ruse of Medusa). Returning to New York, she began writing for ARTnews magazine in 1949 as a way of easing the couple’s dire poverty. She soon became noted for her witty, perceptive analyses of a wide range of art. Her essays on Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Arshile Gorky, and other artists demonstrated her acute sensitivity to their work and personalities, and she emerged as an influential champion of Abstract Expressionism, which was then emerging as a prominent movement. (After her death, a selection of her writing was published in The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings; George Braziller, 1994.)

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In the early 1940s, she began painting self-portraits; a few years later, her sitters began to include family members and acquaintances. Portraits were a way of differentiating herself from her husband, who—despite having drawn and painted memorable images of Elaine—was working in an increasingly abstract style. She was always strongly supportive of his work, even when his ferocious-looking Women paintings of the 1950s were attacked by critics, and she was assumed to have been his model.

After her first solo exhibitions at the Stable Gallery (1952, 1954, 1956), she showed in a number of other galleries, including Graham, Gruenebaum, and Washburn in New York and the Dord Fitz Gallery in Amarillo, Texas. her work was notably featured in "The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York" (1980), at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C..

The months she spent in Albuquerque, N.M. in 1958–59 marked a turning point in her work. She had traveled there to teach graduate art students at the University of New Mexico, the first of many visiting lecturer positions at colleges and universities across the country. Awed by the vast spaces and vivid colors of the Southwestern landscape, she lightened her palette and worked on a larger scale. With a poet friend, Meg Randall, she often traveled to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to watch the bullfights, which gave her an exciting new subject to paint.

Perhaps because of her own natural athleticism, she was always drawn to people and animals in motion. Attracted to the abstract qualities of photographs of basketball players glimpsed at news stands, she began sketching games at Madison Square Garden and on TV. In her studio, she painted the players using compositions borrowed from Old Master paintings. Her sports subjects also included baseball games and Brazilian soccer star Péle.

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Her portrait style borrowed the animated brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism to create a feeling of movement around her sitters. She paid particular attention to the way they carried themselves. Even in her "faceless" portraits (in which facial features are obscured), the figure’s characteristic stance was immediately identifiable to acquaintances. Although she painted commissioned portraits to make money, most of her portraits were of artist and writer friends, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Hess, Alex Katz, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Fairfield Porter.

Elaine de Kooning had a strong social conscience and supported numerous progressive causes, although she was initially critical of the women’s movement. In 1963, at a time when increasing attention was being paid to youthful narcotics users, she monumentalized a group of disaffected young men, most of whom were being treated for drug abuse, in her painting The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue.

Her most famous sitter was President John F. Kennedy, whom she painted at the Winter White House in Palm Beach, Fla. in 1962. Although she was known for working quickly, she spent a year working on the image, and after Kennedy’s assassination she did not paint for nearly the whole of 1964. One of her portraits of Kennedy hangs in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Beginning in the 1970s, travel in Europe broadened the subject matter of her paintings to include a statue in the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris and Paleolithic cave paintings in France and Spain. During this period, she finally gave up drinking, but her smoking habit endured and was the cause of her death from lung cancer. In 1990, a long list of speakers paid tribute to her vibrant personality and many acts of kindness at her nearly three-hour memorial service in New York. A posthumous tribute came with the major exhibit “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits,” in 2015 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today her works hang in the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, among other important collections. Her home and studio in Southampton, Long Island, now host exhibits and artists’ residencies.