Elaine de Kooning was an important and influential American painter, educator, and art critic. The wife of renowned artist Willem de Kooning, she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the New York School, although over the course of her life she experimented with a variety of styles.
The oldest child of Irish-German parents, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried was born in Brooklyn, New York. She was introduced to art at an early age by her mother, who exposed her to a variety of cultural events, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, and covered the walls of their Brooklyn home with reproductions of famous paintings. She attended Erasmus High School, Hunter College, the American Artists School, and the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art in Manhattan. There she studied with Conrad Marca-Relli, an inspirational teacher, and became close with a group of abstract and social realist painters, who influenced her greatly.
In 1938 she met the Dutch immigrant artist Willem de Kooning. The two became acquainted in a Manhattan cafeteria, and she soon became his private pupil. They were married five years later. Their tumultuous relationship, as well as his prodigious success and fame, would significantly affect the rest of her life.
Encouraged by her husband to move beyond the social realist style she was working in at the time, de Kooning began to experiment with a more abstract style. Unsurprisingly, she considered her husband and Arshile Gorky to be the two greatest influences on her painting. She quickly became an active member of the emerging group of Abstract Expressionists in New York. Her first solo exhibition was in 1952 at the Stable Gallery in New York. She also wrote frequently for the publication Art News during the late 1940s and 1950s.
Success began to break apart the New York School toward the late 1950s, and in 1956 Elaine and Willem de Kooning had an amicable separation. After the separation, she began to travel around the country in a series of visiting professorships. They eventually reconciled in the 1970s.
Throughout her long career as an educator, de Kooning held teaching positions at numerous institutions, including Yale University, Connecticut; Carnegie-Mellon University, Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania; University of Georgia; and Bard College, Cooper Union, and the Parsons School on Fine Art, all in New York.
De Kooning died of lung cancer at Southampton Hospital on February 1, 1989.
Her work may be found in many world-class intuitions, such as the San Diego Museum of Art, California; the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
KW
The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery LLC and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from Spanierman Gallery LLC nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery LLC.
