Elaine de Kooning

(from http://www.hackettfreedman.com/templates/artist.jsp?id=KOO 7-17-07)Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989), the wife of Willem de Kooning, was an exemplary painter in her own right and a central figure in New York City's artistic circles of the 1950s and 1960s. An influential art critic, she was at the heart of the abstract expressionist movement and championed many of the New York School artists in her articles for ARTnews.Born in Brooklyn, de Kooning was an active participate in painting circles in New York in the 1930s. Upon graduating from high school, she attended classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, where she studied under Conrad Marca-Relli, and later at the urging of painter Milton Resnick transferred to the American Artists School, where she earned money working as an artist's model. During the late 1930s and early 40s she executed a notable series of cityscape drawings and watercolors. De Kooning met her future husband in 1938 and married him in 1943. Their early years together were marked by grueling poverty and they separated not long thereafter. In the 1950s, she gained widespread recognition for her series of paintings based on photographs of sports figures. Their bold, fresh colors and energetic use of abstract expressionist forms became a hallmark of de Kooning's oeuvre and is present in her later paintings of landscapes, bullfighters, and horses, the latter which were inspired by the Paleolithic drawings in the caves of Lascaux, France.De Kooning was also an extremely talented portraitist and painted many of her literary friends and fellow artists, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, the artist Fairfield Porter, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. While these portraits are prized today for their freshness and verve, at the time de Kooning considered them to be private, personal efforts. In the 1970s, de Kooning taught at the University of Georgia, Athens, the beginning of a long and influential teaching career. (She taught at many prominent American universities, including the University of California, Davis; Carnegie Mellon; Yale; and the Parsons School of Design.) From 1976–1978 she executed her monumental Bacchus series inspired by sculpture in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.Elaine and Willem de Kooning eventually reconciled in 1975 and lived together in East Hampton, New York, up until Elaine's death in 1989. After her death, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchased Untitled #15 (Black Mountain), one of seventeen canvases that she completed at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948 but had never exhibited. Elaine de Kooning’s paintings are included in the collections of many major American museums including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C., and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.------------http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/12/elaine-de-kooning-birthday_n_2857575.html March 12, 2013Today is the birthday of abstract expressionist painting maven Elaine de Kooning. The acclaimed landscape and portrait artist, who also happened to the wife of the Dutch American action painter, Willem de Kooning, would turn 93 years old if she were still alive today. De Kooning, née Fried, was born in Brooklyn in 1920, and studied at Hunter College before honing her art talents at both the Leonard da Vinci Art School in Hoboken, New Jersey and the American Artists School in New York City. At 18, she met her husband and future art world companion, Willem De Kooning, and had first solo art show nearly a decade after their marriage. Over the course of her career she was devoted to both painting and instructing, serving as a professor at Yale, Cooper Union and Bard. Her artworks were the result of tireless preparation, often the result of numerous sketches and trial canvases. "Style is something I've always tried to avoid," de Kooning once told Rose Slivka. "I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it."