Elaine de Kooning

Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.

Studies
In grade school, Elaine began drawing and selling portraits of children attending her school. She was interested in and did well at sports as well as art. Elaine studied at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. After graduating from High School, she briefly studied math at Hunter College in New York City, where she befriended a group of abstract and Social Realist painters. In 1937, she attended the Leonardo da Vinci Art School and went on to study at the American Artists School, both in New York City. While attending school, Elaine made money working as an art school model.

Career
Elaine de Kooning was an accomplished landscape and portrait artist active in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the mid-twentieth century. She was a member of the Eighth Street Club (the Club) in New York City. The Club functioned as a space to discuss ideas. Among this group of artists were Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Rosati, Giorgio Spaventi, Milton Resnick, Pat Passlof, Earl Kerkam, Ludwig Sander, Angelo Ippolito, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann. A membership position for a woman was rare at that time.

Elaine promoted Willem's work throughout their relationship. Along with her own work as a painter, she was committed to gaining recognition for her husband's work. Though she was very serious about her own work, she was well-aware that it was often overshadowed by her husband's fame. After showing their work in their 1951 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Artists: Man and Wife, which also included Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Elaine said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but later I came to think that it was a bit of a put-down of the women. There was something about the show that sort of attached women-wives- to the real artists". Despite this effect on her own career, Elaine continued to promote her husband.

In 1952 she spent the summer at Art dealer Leo Castelli's house at The Hamptons with Willem de Kooning.

In April 1954 Elaine presented her first Solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery (she sometimes declared it was in 1952 but the gallery was founded in 1953)

Women were often marginalized in the Abstract Expressionist movement, functioning as objects and accessories to confirm the masculinity of their male counterparts. For that reason, she chose to sign her artworks with her initials rather than her full name, to avoid her paintings' being labeled as feminine in a traditionally masculine movement, and to not be confused with her husband Willem de Kooning.

Elaine and Willem were also part of the New York School scene, which included Jackson Pollock.

Elaine de Kooning was an important writer and teacher of art. She began working at the magazine ARTnews in 1948, and wrote articles about major figures in the art world. She wrote about one hundred articles for Art News magazine. Elaine de Kooning was the first American artist in the 1950s to take on the role of artists' critic. "As an writer, she wrote about culture, art, and new ideas to her generation of artists and readers." Although Elaine was a successful writer, she considered herself a "painter by nature." Elaine de Kooning's art and writing were all devoted to art and humanity.

Over the course of her life, she held teaching posts at many institutions of higher education. In 1957, after Elaine and Willem de Kooning separated, she took on a series of short-term teaching jobs to support herself. She taught at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; the University of California in Davis; at Carnegie Mellon, at Southampton College on Long Island; at the Cooper Union and Pratt Institute in New York; at Yale; at RISD in Rhode Island; Bard College; the University of Georgia and the New York Studio School in Paris. Between 1976 and 1978, she served as the first Lamar Dodd Visiting Professor of Art at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. In 1985 she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full academician in 1988.

In 2016 de Kooning was one of twelve female artists featured in the "Women of Abstract Expressionism" exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum. The purpose of this show was to highlight the unique talents and perspectives of female artists who, as was previously noted, were often dismissed or overshadowed by their male counterparts. The show later traveled to the Mint Museum and the Palm Springs Art Museum.

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

"For Elaine, everything was always new, never resolved, always being unmade and made, as if it had never been made before. She did not accumulate experience and learn what to expect... Life was a constant surprise." Being the wife of the famous painter Willem de Kooning, she did not receive real recognition for her own achievement until a few years before she died. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2025