Elaine de Kooning

When asked late in her life how hard it had been to live and paint in the shadow of her internationally acclaimed husband, Elaine De Kooning replied, "Actually, I live in his light."

Though a gracious nod to the influence of her husband and onetime teacher, Willem De Kooning, she faced a challenge few artists have to confront: establishing her own reputation independent of an iconic spouse. Elaine De Kooning, who died in 1989, has for two decades been emerging from the long shadow of Willem's stature. Her extraordinary body of work reflects a dedication to a strong traditional art foundation, tempered by a passion for nonconventional methods and the styles associated with the New York School and the Abstract Expressionists.

Elaine spent a significant part of her early life and career actively promoting the talent of her husband, while skillfully positioning herself as acritic for major art magazines and as a well-versed lecturer. But as she situated herself among the most critically acclaimed creative minds of the period, like Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, the artist was creating a body of work of exceptional range that was all her own.

Her formal artistic training began in 1937 with Conrad Marca-Relli in New York. Shortly thereafter, she opted for an unconventional curriculum and enrolled at the American Artists School, a progressive institution recognized for promoting the integration of art and social interests in the 1930s. In 1938, Elaine met Willem, then an upcoming artist in the American avant-garde, and began studying under his direction.

Elaine's artistic sensibility and preoccupation with the plastic qualities of her subject (i.e., surface, texture, and shape) existed before her studies with Willem. But his European-influenced perspective provided her a greater understanding of compositional and spatial relationships within her work. By the late 1940s, she had progressed to pure abstractions, seeking out the interactive qualities of both negative and positive space and their successful integration.

The 1950s brought significant recognition of Elaine De Kooning s mature style. She secured several solo exhibitions at notable galleries, including the Stable Gallery, Tibor de Nagy, and the Graham Gallery in New York. Her work during the early 1950s marked the beginning of the artistic vocabulary which would dominate the entirety of her career. The compositions, with their highly charged surfaces and depth of emotion, express "imminent drama"; "visual analogies to the adrenaline-fueled action evoked by their titles (i.e., Angry Man)." Her work was also shown in several important exhibitions, including the landmark Ninth Street Show in 1951, Young American Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, and Artists of the NY School: 2nd Generation at the Jewish Museum in 1957. She was also included in the Ten Best list in ArtNews in 1956.

In 1957, following her separation from Willem, Elaine took her first teaching appointment as visiting professor at the University of New Mexico. As a result, the characteristic color and space of the Southwestern landscape impacted her work, giving it a renewed sense of color, energy and expansiveness. However, it was the bullfights in Juarez, Mexico, that would provide the backdrop for Elaine s most successful works of this period. Fascinated by the masculinity and ferocity of the bull juxtaposed with the lyrical and provocative taunting of the matador, Elaine created more than a hundred compositions in the next decade, works which became known as her Bull Series.

Equally important was the Bacchus series, based upon the 19th century sculpture in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Walking through the Gardens in 1976, the artist encountered what she called "one of those wonderful, exuberant statues one sees all over Paris." She began a series of sketches that led to painted images that would preoccupy her for several years. In this series, she gives life to an autonomy of form, color, and light, allowing her subject to both explode and dissipate with each brushstroke. Demonstrating her extraordinary talent as an action painter, brushstrokes dance around the figures, sweeping up and down, in and out, continuously shaping the multidimensional contours of her subject. Yet with all this dynamic movement, the density of the central image holds the viewer s eye.

Elaine often worked on as many as eight paintings in the series at one time, some large, some small, but there appeared to be no hierarchy of size. Big did not necessarily mean more important.

Although she wavered between pure and figurative abstractions throughout her life, Elaine De Kooning s portraits may be her unique visual signature. Her gifted interpretation of the portrait genre was rewarded when she was commissioned to paint President John F. Kennedy for the Truman Library in 1963. Beginning work just months before his death, her approach vividly conveyed feeling and gesture, while combining a stylized sense of physical likeness with personality, a modern style immediately recognizable as her own. Accurate reproduction of features seemed only incidental to the finished image. All of De Kooning s portraits sought to penetrate and expose the gesture of a subject, combining, in her words, the  simultaneous imaginative conception of how they walk, sit, scratch, yawn, and think.  As she shifted between precisely rendered portraits and those of subtle abstraction, many times faceless, her subjects were always alive with their unique personality.

In the final stages of her artistic progression, Elaine De Kooning visited the prehistoric caves of Lascaux in France in 1983 and was awed by their velocity of energy. The imagery was especially moving, as it related to that of the bull paintings she was so intimately involved with decades earlier. She executed hundreds of watercolors and sketches at the site, then returned to East Hampton to begin an extensive series of paintings she would call The Time of the Bison.

These evocative works combined volumes of paint with transparent paper and canvas in a display of pinks and lavenders and yellows, a two-dimensional tour-de-force of form and contour. Abstracted form emerged from line and evolved into shadowy shapes of pure movement — a herd of vivid yellows or ochre in full flight.

Throughout her career Elaine De Kooning's gallery, museum, and peer recognition was always formidable, but segregating her reputation from its inevitable links to her husband would prove challenging. Only in recent years has her work begun to receive the full recognition that it deserves.
 

"I like the idea of escaping from style, but when you look at all my work, there begins to be a unity."

A unity and strength that, near the end of her life, would lead a critic at The New York Times to describe a group of her paintings as " almost too good to be true, adding to the history of Abstract Expressionism more than a footnote."