Elaine de kooning biography of albert

Willem had a daughter, Lisa de Kooning, in , as a result of his affair with Joan Ward [ who? Elaine and Willem both struggled with alcoholism , which eventually led to their separation in Despite struggling with alcoholism, they both continued painting. Although separated for nearly twenty years, they never divorced, ultimately reuniting in Elaine de Kooning was an accomplished landscape and portrait artist active in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the mid-twentieth century.

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.

There was something about the show that sort of attached women-wives- to the real artists". In April Elaine presented her first Solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery she sometimes declared it was in but the gallery was founded in [ 10 ] [ 12 ]. Women were often marginalized in the Abstract Expressionist movement, functioning as objects and accessories to confirm the masculinity of their male counterparts.

Elaine de Kooning was an important writer and teacher of art. She began working at the magazine ARTnews in , and wrote articles about major figures in the art world. She wrote about one hundred articles for Art News magazine. Over the course of her life, she held teaching posts at many institutions of higher education. In , after Elaine and Willem de Kooning separated, she took on a series of short-term teaching jobs to support herself.

In she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full academician in In de Kooning was one of twelve female artists featured in the "Women of Abstract Expressionism " exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum. A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

She did not accumulate experience and learn what to expect Life was a constant surprise. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Elaine de Kooning made both abstract and figurative paintings and drawings of still life, cityscapes, and portraits. Her work was influenced by the artists Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky , artists who worked abstractly and also in a figurative way.

Her earlier work comprised watercolors and still lifes, including fifty watercolor sketches inspired by a statue in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Later in her career, her work fused abstraction with mythology, primitive imagery, and realism. Her gestural style of portraiture is often noted, although her work was mostly figurative and representational, and rarely purely abstract.

She produced a diverse body of work over the course of her lifetime, including sculpture, etchings, and work inspired by cave drawings, all in addition to her many paintings. Her work presents a combination between painting and drawing, surface and contour, stroke and line, color and light, transparency and opacity. When asked about her style she said, "I'm more interested in character than style.

Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on the work. Style can be a prison. Elaine studied under Josef Albers, R. Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham. A large portion of Elaine de Kooning's work was in portraiture. In addition to painting many self-portraits throughout the course of her life, her subjects were often fellow artists—usually men—including poets Frank O'Hara , John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg ; writer Donald Barthelme; art critic Harold Rosenberg ; Thomas B.

Although she worked in a gestural Abstract Expressionist mode, she never abandoned working with the figure ensuring the person's likeness. It was only in the mids, after both had overcome their struggles with alcoholism, that they reunited and began living together again. In , Elaine started experimenting with acrylic paints. In the s, she traveled extensively throughout Europe, China, and Japan.

Inspired by her experiences, she began working with ink and graphic art upon her return, creating pieces like "Ascending Wall" A passionate smoker, Elaine de Kooning passed away in from lung cancer. She is remembered as a charismatic figure in the American art scene of the 20th century and is considered one of the finest representatives of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, alongside artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell.

Contact About Privacy. Billy Childish. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Elaine de Kooning — Portrait of Allen Ginsberg She was a prolific artist, art critic, portraitist, and teacher during the height of the Abstract Expressionist era and well beyond.

Mixing abstraction and representation in much of her work, de Kooning took inspiration not only from those around her, but from bullfights, sculpture, and cave paintings. Although her early career was overshadowed by that of her husband, Willem de Kooning , Elaine's artistic range, vast knowledge of media, and influence on fellow artists was undeniable.

Elaine de Kooning's work continues to receive increasing critical attention and find its place among her New York School peers. De Kooning did several self-portraits in the mids, and this one at the National Portrait Gallery is one of the most fully realized. The artist sits in a chair, holding a sketchbook and stares directly out at the viewer.

She is surrounded by objects in the studio - a decanter, a small sculpture, a hanging textile, a postcard, and a plant. A cup of coffee and an ashtray sit on the floor near her feet. The inclusion of these objects make the painting almost as much of a still life study as a portrait and perhaps recalls her early training with Willem Bill de Kooning, who insisted on learning from still lifes.

The browns, ochers, and pinks of the painting also recall Bill's paintings of men that he completed in the later s and early s, but here Elaine presents herself assertively as an artist. While not posed with a canvas and easel, Elaine was actually making intimate pencil portraits of her friends around this time. In the mid s, Elaine and Bill were poorer than ever, and both were experiencing great difficulty in selling any work.

Fairfield Porter, artist and critic himself, sits on a bistro chair, squarely facing the viewer. His legs are spread, and his hands rest in his lap. The details of his setting are not entirely clear, although a vase of bright yellow flowers sits atop a table behind. Most noticeable is the fact that de Kooning has not painted his face in any detail.

The viewer can see the general shape, the hair, and Porter's eyebrows, but in this portrait, likeness is found less in his facial features than how he wears his suit, sits in his chair, and gestures with his hands. De Kooning painted many of her male friends with their legs provocatively splayed, transgressing usual norms. And I though, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects.

Her sister Marjorie Fried Luyckx, recalled, "In doing a portrait she seemed to apply the brushstrokes in a wildly random manner and yet, sometimes suddenly, a startling likeness of the figure would emerge. If it didn't, she would set the canvas aside and begin on a second without changing the position of the sitter and often a third or even a fourth.

Almost eleven feet wide and about six-and-a-half-feet tall, Bullfight is one of de Kooning's largest paintings. Seemingly abstract, the bold, colorful gestures suggest the scene of a bullfight, if not representationally, then certainly in its dynamism, vividness, and energy. Shortly after her arrival at the University of New Mexico in to teach painting, her friend, poet Margaret Randall, escorted de Kooning to Ciudad Juarez, just across the Mexican border from El Paso, to watch the bullfights.

De Kooning was captivated by the movements and colors of her new surroundings. De Kooning's time in the American West, was more than an escape from her long-faltering marriage. De Kooning told a reporter from Texas that New Mexico "was a revelation. It was so different from New York, where I'd always lived. Suddenly I abandoned gray and my painting became bright with color.

This wonderful space had its effect after those crowded city streets. I'd always painted vertically on rectangular canvases; now I paint horizontally for the feeling of wide spaces. Not only, then, were the experiences of the western landscape and the sensuousness of the bullfights consequential for the shift in de Kooning's style, but the experience of a new kind of freedom was important for her new direction in painting.

When de Kooning traveled to West Palm Beach, Florida, to paint Kennedy's portrait in December , she commented that the president was difficult to sketch due to his "extreme restlessness In this depiction that is just slightly larger than life-size, the viewer sees a lean, vertical likeness of the young president, with the artist's gestural rhythms evoking the restlessness of her subject.

The yellows and golds as well as the vivid greens and watery blues, recall her impression on first meeting her subject: "He was incandescent, golden. And bigger than life. Without depicting the trappings and symbols of the presidency or any patriotic colors, de Kooning presents the viewer with, in the words of art historian Simona Cupic, "just a personal awareness and the memory of the moment when she saw him," thus "offering a model of a new - contemporary - official paintings of a president.

In this sizable canvas, verdant greens, grays, and blues mingle across the canvas. When one concentrates on the black lines drawn over the colors, an image of a sculptural group of figures comes into better focus. As if standing below, the viewer looks up at the intertwined, spirited figures back-dropped by summer foliage and clear blue sky.

During a visit to Paris in , de Kooning saw a 19th-century sculpture of Bacchus - the Roman god of wine and intoxication - in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and upon returning to her temporary studio in Athens, Georgia, she subsequently began a series of large paintings based on the subject. According to one curator, de Kooning "particularly admired the sculpture's twisting, dynamic form, which portrays the commotion created by the drunken god and his equally inebriated attendants.

Despite the change in medium, the combination and tension of abstraction and figuration remained a constant for de Kooning. One of her friends, Karen Gunderson explained, "She understood the essence of a form and was able to describe that with a particularly personal and yet incredibly descriptive abstraction of energy. The underlying abstraction was feeding the reality.

Inspired by what she witnessed inside, de Kooning began her Cave Painting series, which included this painting. Faint outlines of horses, antelopes, and buffalo intermingle and overlap with each other, atop streaks of mauve, blue, red, and purple. In a particularly illuminating moment, she told one reporter, "The cave painters took tremendous liberties with proportions.

Elaine de kooning biography of albert

That's what fascinated me - to make a horse in as many ways as possible. And I loved the jumps in scale. Some animals were tiny, others huge. I liked the profusion of animals, too, one superimposed upon another, and the contrast of both crude and primitive forms versus sophisticated ones. There's also a tremendous immediacy about the cave work that has much more to do with today's art, than, let's say, with Renaissance art.