Elaine de Kooning was an American art critic, portraitist, teacher, and painter in the post-World War II era. He created his works in the abstract expressionist style.
Background
Ethnicity:
Elaine de Kooning's mother was an Irish while her father was of Jewish descent.
De Kooning was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on March 12, 1918. She was the first of four children of Marie and Charles Frank Fried. His father was a plant manager for the Bond Bread Company in Brooklyn, New York.
Education
At a young age, Elaine de Kooning's mother taught her how to draw, and often took her to museums. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Since 1936 Elaine de Kooning studied at Hunter College, New York. In 1937 she began studying art at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, New York, with Conrad Marca-Relli, with whom them became close friends. In 1938 Elaine de Kooning attended the American Artists School. At school, she earned her living by working as an art school model.
De Kooning's early works included mainly still lifes and portraits. His paintings were apparently influenced by Cubism, but by the end of the 1940s, she started to create abstract paintings and also write art criticism. She served as an editorial associate at Art News under the guidance of Thomas Hess. There she wrote essays on Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline, and contributed to the expansion of the abstract expressionism, making it accessible to a broader audience.
In 1948, Elaine de Kooning spent the whole summer at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where she played the key role in a creation of Erik Satie’s Le piège de Méduse (The Ruse of Medusa, 1948), produced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The same year she began working at the magazine Artnews and wrote articles about the most significant individuals in the world of art. Elaine de Kooning wrote about a hundred articles for the magazine.
De Kooning's first personal exhibition took place in 1952 at the Stable Gallery, New York, where she exhibited again in the years 1954 and 1956. Because of the fact that women were often marginalized in the Abstract Expressionist movement, she decided to sign her artworks with her initials rather than her full name.
She became a founding member of the Club, a group of avant-garde artists. Between 1949 and 1962 they met in Greenwich Village to debate and discuss art. Although she was a strong defender of Abstract Expressionism, she ultimately became known for her portraits, particularly for men ones.
Over the course of her life, Elaine de Kooning occupied teaching positions at many institutions of higher education. She received a teaching appointment at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1958, and traveled to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where she witnessed her first bullfight. This experience inspired her to create a series of bull paintings on horizontal canvases. The following years she worked at the University of California in Davis; at Carnegie Mellon, at Southampton College on Long Island; at RISD in Rhode Island; Bard College; the University of Georgia; the New York Studio School in Paris; etc.
In 1961 de Kooning was included in the Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial), New York. In the year 1962, she was commissioned to paint John F. Kennedy’s portrait. After the president’s death in 1964, the painter stopped painting for another year. From 1976 to 1978 she held the post of the first Lamar Dodd visiting professor of art at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens.
From the late 1940s to the early 1980s, she painted basketball players at play using an expressionistic style. In the 1980s she made a series of quasi-figurative, orgiastic paintings titled Bacchus. In 1983 Elaine de Kooning went to the Paleolithic caves in Lascaux, France, and started a series of paintings based on the cave paintings, titled Cave Walls. At the late years of her life, she produced a number of artworks on paper in ink.
Elaine de Kooning was raised by a Catholic mother and a Protestant father.
Views
Quotations:
"Style is something I’ve always tried to avoid. I’m more interested in character."
"Artists are like cockroaches; everything is grist for the mill."
"Women can also be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher."
"Every artist returns to things - the drawings that you make as a child or as an adolescent and the ideas that you have as a young beginning artist - no doubt they crop up again and again."
"Inspiration is indispensable to my work, but it is hard to come by. It is there or it is not; it is a gift of the gods."
"A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image."
Membership
Elaine de Kooning was a member of the Eighth Street Club (the Club) in New York City. Among the group supporters were such artists as Willem de Kooning, Giorgio Spaventi, Clyfford Still, Jimmy Rosati, Milton Resnick, Earl Kerkam, Ludwig Sander, Angelo Ippolito, Pat Passlof, Franz Kline, and Hans Hofmann. In 1985 she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member and became a full academician in 1988.
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1985
Connections
Elaine de Kooning had admired Willem de Kooning’s artworks even before she met him. In 1938 her teacher introduced her to de Kooning at a Manhattan cafeteria. At that time, she was 20 and he was 34. After their meeting, he began to train her in drawing and painting. He constantly criticized her works and even destroyed many of her drawings. Elaine de Kooning married Willem de Kooning in 1943. Elaine and Willem de Kooning had an open marriage. Elaine usually had affairs with men who helped her husband's career. They both struggled with alcoholism. It was the reason for their separation in 1956, however, they never divorced. After they separated, Elaine de Kooning stayed in New York, making ends meet, and Willem went to Long Island and struggling with his depression. Ultimately they reunited in 1976.