Elaine de Kooning

Active in the New York school of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-20th century, Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) developed a lifelong commitment to figuration through the gestural painting practice of the movement. Born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and later the American Artists School.

In 1938 the artist met and took drawing lessons from Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning, who would eventually become her husband in 1943. Elaine de Kooning’s early works spanned still lifes and portraits influenced by Cubism. In the mid- to late 1940s, she turned to abstraction and began a career in art criticism as an editorial associate at Art News magazine. There she wrote essays on Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann and Franz Kline, promoting Abstract Expressionism to a broader audience.

De Kooning was a founding member of the Eighth Street Club (the Club) in New York City. Between 1949 and 1962, the Club served as a meeting space for a group of avant-garde artists to discuss and debate art. Despite her close association with Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning was celebrated for portraits. In 1962 the artist was commissioned to paint John F. Kennedy’s portrait.

In 1958 de Kooning travelled to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico following a teaching appointment at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In Mexico, she was her first bullfight, which inspired a series of bull paintings on horizontal canvases with a dynamic and bold palette.

The artist began her renowned Bacchus series of paintings and watercolours in 1976 and spanned over the next seven years. In this series de Kooning was inspired by the 19th-century sculpture of the Roman god in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, which she depicted in twisting, dynamic forms.

In 1983, de Kooning, always filled with wanderlust, visited the Paleolithic caves in Lascaux, France, which inspired a series of work based on the paintings housed within the caves. Representative of the series are swift outlines of powerful mammals such as deer, bison, ibex, horses, and bulls, rendered on a monumental scale. Just like the western landscape of the Southwest heralded a new direction in her work in the late 1950s, the prehistoric cave paintings seen on her trip to the South of France invigorated a new body of work in the last decade of her life.

Her ability to adapt and her eagerness to experiment with new influences are perhaps indicative of her curiosity and constantly evolving way of life. De Kooning died in 1989 in New York.