Elaine de Kooning

Biography

In the autumn of 1938, in a Manhattan cafeteria, her teacher Robert Jonas introduced the twenty-year-old Elaine Fried to Willem de Kooning; he was thirty-four. She had known his work before that. He began teaching her to draw: he made her draw a figure or a still life over and over, demanded a precise, clear line and, at times, destroyed her sheets. On 9 December 1943 they married, and she moved into his loft on West 21st Street.

She took to signing her work with her initials: so that the pictures would not be called feminine, or mistaken for his.

She was born on 12 March 1918 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the eldest of four children; her father managed a bread plant. From the age of five her mother took her to museums and told her to draw what she saw, and hung her room with reproductions. At school she drew and sold portraits of her classmates, after school she briefly studied mathematics at Hunter College, in 1937 she entered the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, then the American Artists School, and earned her living as a model. In 1944, at a Virgil Thomson concert, she met the Dutch painter Joop Sanders, and they agreed to pose for each other: a day of drawing, a week for the painting, dozens of portraits she called the “Joops”. On portraits, in her own words, she was “hooked”. In the summer of 1948 she and Willem were at Black Mountain College, where she studied under Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham and acted in performances. The same year she began writing for ARTnews and over the years published about a hundred articles in it; of the painters of her generation she was the first to take up criticism in earnest. She was admitted to the Club on Eighth Street, where Kline, Still, Hofmann and Willem argued, which for a woman was a rarity then.

In 1951 she took part in the Ninth Street Show, and at the Sidney Janis Gallery in the exhibition “Artists: Man and Wife”, together with Pollock and Krasner, Nicholson and Hepworth, Arp and Taeuber-Arp; later she said the idea had turned out to be “a bit of a put-down of the women”: the wives seemed attached to the real artists. In April 1954 the Stable Gallery showed her first solo exhibition; at the time she was painting faceless seated men, “Al Lazar (Man in a Hotel Room)” and “Peter” (both 1954). “When I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes,” she explained. She painted portraits all her life: the poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg, the critic Harold Rosenberg, Merce Cunningham, Leo Castelli, Ornette Coleman, Pelé, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and Willem; the stroke is sweeping, expressionist, but she never let go of the likeness. To my mind her portraits rest on exactly that argument between stroke and likeness.

In 1957 she and Willem separated without divorcing, and she lived on short teaching contracts. From the autumn of 1958 to the spring of 1959 she was visiting professor at the University of New Mexico: the cottonwoods and aspens, she wrote, had “turned an overwhelming gold”, and the mountains “seem to move toward you”; in Juárez she went to bullfights and painted a series on them in bright colours, and in Santa Fe she visited Georgia O’Keeffe, a “grand old gal” who, she said, looked like a monk. In 1962 the Truman Library commissioned from her a portrait of John F. Kennedy, the most important commission of her life; after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 she stopped painting for a year, and on returning began a series of men with children and a series of women. She taught at Davis, Carnegie Mellon, Cooper Union, Pratt, Yale, the Rhode Island School of Design, Bard, the University of Georgia and the Paris branch of the New York Studio School; in 1985 she was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, and a full academician in 1988.

In 1976 she and Willem came back together. The same year, in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, she was caught by a nineteenth-century statue of Bacchus, by his twisting body and drunken retinue, and for seven years painted the “Bacchus” series. In 1983 she visited the caves of Lascaux and Altamira and saw in Palaeolithic painting the roots of Abstract Expressionism; the “Cave Walls” series was shown by the Fischbach Gallery in November 1988. Style, she said, can be laid on top of the work, while character comes out of it on its own: “Style can be a prison.”

Elaine de Kooning died on 1 February 1989 in Southampton, on Long Island, three months after the “Cave Walls” exhibition. Recognition came to her late and mostly after her death: in 2015 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, which holds the largest collection of her portraits, mounted the exhibition “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits”, in 2016 her work was included in Denver’s “Women of Abstract Expressionism”, in 2021 in “Women in Abstraction” at the Centre Pompidou. Her pieces are in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim.