de Kooning, Elaine Fried (1918–1989)

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de Kooning, Elaine Fried (1918–1989)

American painter and art critic who was an Abstract Expressionist of the New York School. Born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on May 12, 1918; died on February 1, 1989; first of four children, two girls and two boys, of Marie and Charles Fried; graduated from Erasmus High School; attended Hunter College but left to enroll in the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and the American Artists School; married artist Willem de Kooning (1905–1997), in 1943; no children.

Elaine de Kooning, artist, writer, and wife of famous painter Willem de Kooning, was a central figure in the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. Although she considered herself first and foremost a painter, de Kooning was also a talented writer whose contributions to Art News and other magazines established her as the foremost voice of the New York School. John Canaday, in a New York Times article, called her the "mascot, sybil, and recording secretary" of Abstract Expressionism.

De Kooning grew up in Brooklyn, the eldest child of a middle-class family. Her earliest influence was her mother Marie Fried , who took her on weekly excursions to the Metropolitan Museum and exposed her to literature, theater, and the opera. At the age of six, de Kooning was drawing constantly and by ten was referred to by her peers as "the artist." After high school, she attended Hunter College for about a month before enrolling in both the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and the American Artists School, which were then two of the most popular art schools in New York. A beautiful young woman, with great intelligence and a quick wit, de Kooning was extremely popular and enjoyed the attentions of a number of men. One of her early liaisons was with painter Milton Resnick, after which she met Willem de Kooning, a strikingly attractive and gifted artist whose passions in life were, by his own admission, painting and women. Willem became her teacher, and they married in 1943, becoming the darlings of a colorful bohemian art scene that included Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barrett Newmann, and Jackson Pollock. Although the marriage was unconventional (the couple lived apart for some 20 years, and Willem fathered a child with another woman), de Kooning always credited Willem as her original teacher and greatest influence. Once when questioned about working in the shadow of a famous husband, she replied, "I don't work in his shadow. I work in his light."

In spite of the financial hardships of the 1940s, de Kooning drew and painted continuously, producing still lifes, cityscapes, and portraits, including many of her husband. Enduring a skimpy diet, and often forced to paint over old canvases because she couldn't afford new ones, she perfected her own "action painting" technique, consisting of the bold, slashing strokes seen in a series of paintings called "Faceless Men" (1949–1956), in which the subjects were recognizable only by their characteristic body stances. De Kooning's sister Marjorie Luyckx , in an essay on the artist, describes Elaine's technique as instinctive. "In doing a portrait she seemed to apply the brushstrokes in a wildly random manner and yet, sometimes suddenly, a startling likeness of the figure would emerge. If it didn't, she would set the canvas aside and begin on a second without changing the position of the sitter (and often a third or even a fourth)."

By the early 1960s, de Kooning was well known as a portrait painter, using as subjects members of her wide and impressive circle of friends and admirers, including critic Harold Rosenbert, poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, artist Aristodimos Kaldis, and President John F. Kennedy. Commissioned to paint the president in 1962, she was still at work on the preliminary series of studies when he was assassinated. One of the 36 studies she produced now resides in the Truman Library in Missouri; another is housed at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

De Kooning was encouraged in her early writing career by poet Edwin Denby, the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and Thomas Hess, then editor of Art News, who hired her in 1948. During the course of her career, she turned out some 100 articles for Art News as well as other magazines and was the first in the American art scene of the 1950s to take on the dual role of artist and critic. (Fairfield Porter joined her at Art News in 1955.) Her close proximity to artists of the New York School helped make her a successful critic, claims artist Rose Slivka : "As an Abstract Expressionist painter herself, she wrote from inside the group, sharing the special friendship and confidence of the artists in each other, having access to their studios, and learning the thoughts and techniques artists reserve only for each other." Two of de Kooning's finest essays were on fellow artists and personal friends Arshile Gorky ("Gorky: Painter of His Own Legend") and Franz Kline ("Franz Kline: Painter of His Own Life").

In the late 1950s, as the artists in the New York School became relatively prosperous, life in the city for de Kooning began to dissolve into rounds of gallery openings and parties, which she found self-destructive. Her paintings reflected her mood, with heavy colors and titles such as Man in Hiding, Death of Johnny A, and Suicide. In 1957, she left New York to teach at the University of New Mexico, the first of many guest teaching positions she would undertake throughout her career. During this period, she began a series of bullfight paintings (1957–63), brilliant works in slashing strokes of magenta, chartreuse, orange, and blue, executed in ink washes, watercolors, lithographs, and oils, which ranged in size from ten inches to ten feet. These were followed by a basketball and baseball series during the 1960s and a later series on the theme of Bacchus (1976–83), inspired by a 19th-century sculpture in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris.

De Kooning's final series, begun in 1983, was inspired by the 25,000-year-old cave paintings in the Pyrenees mountains of France and would consume the artist for the rest of her life. In viewing the Paleolithic cave drawings, de Kooning felt she was accessing her own artistic roots as she discovered relationships between the methods of these earliest artists and those of the Abstract Expressionists. "They gave the affirmation to her own way of working," Slivka explains, "and became a culmination, a coming together from her whole life, of her ways of working, of action painting, with its ambiguities, erasures, interplay of contour, surface, line, slash, smudge, dot, and drip."

De Kooning's first one-woman show was at the New York Stabel Gallery in 1954 and was followed by over 50 solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad during the course of her career. She received her widest recognition as a painter after she reached age 60; her cave paintings were the subject of ten one-woman shows between 1987 and 1988. The last exhibition of her work while she was alive opened in November 1988 at the Fischbach Gallery and included her cave series as well as High Wall, a triptych nine feet wide and almost twenty feet high, which is considered by many to be her masterpiece. She worked on High Wall for over a year, along with a series of small, simple Sumi paintings done with brush and ink.