Elaine de Kooning

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Elaine Marie de Kooning (born Elaine Marie Fried ; born March 12, 1918 in Brooklyn , New York , † February 1, 1989 in Southampton , New York) was an American painter , graphic artist and art critic . She was a representative of Abstract Expressionism , a member of the New York School and, as an author and art professor, played an important role in the development of modern art in the USA after 1945.

life and work

The young Elaine Marie Fried grew up in Brooklyn. The girl was introduced to art at an early age by her mother, who took her to museums and taught her to draw everything she saw there. In 1936 she began studying at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York, but soon switched to the American Artists School , where she began studying in 1938 with the Dutch artist Willem de Kooning, who had emigrated to the USA . The teacher-student relationship should develop into a lifelong, passionate and destructive relationship. The two married on December 9, 1943.

The connection with de Kooning brought her together with Arshile Gorky , John D. Graham , Franz Kline , Jackson Pollock , Mark Rothko , Clyfford Still , Mark Tobey and other artists in the field of action painting and the "new American abstraction" and thus established her from 1948 through numerous monographs by these artists for the journal Art news as an art critic. In the same year she began her first abstract works. Together with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt and other painters and writers, she became a founding member of the artists' meeting The Club , which united the “first generation” of the New York School. In 1951 she took part in the group exhibition Ninth Street Show , which was to become a trend-setting show of the abstract expressionists and which was financially supported by the aspiring gallery owner Leo Castelli . In 1954 she had her first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York. In the mid-1950s, de Kooning mainly painted portraits of faceless men like Al Lazar (Man in a Hotel Room) or Peter (both 1954), mixing the figurative representation with an expressive abstract brushstroke.

Inspired by the impressions of a trip to the American west coast and to Mexico , she changed her visual language towards the end of the 1950s: She broke away from the strict monochrome caused by the so-called Black Paintings of her New York artist colleagues and replaced her palette with lighter, clearer colors and figurative forms. In the Mexican Ciudad Juarez was born with pictures like Sunday Afternoon (1957), a series of bullfighting scenes. From the early 1960s she preferred to work as a portrait painter. In 1962 she was commissioned to paint a portrait of the then US President John F. Kennedy for the Harry S. Truman Library , but severely shocked by his murder in 1963, she interrupted her work as a painter for a year. At this time she took up her activity as an art teacher and was visiting professor at numerous universities such as Yale and Carnegie Mellon University until 1972 . From 1974 she was a professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York and in the meantime, in 1975, artist in residence at Brandeis University in Waltham , Massachusetts . In the following years she supported young artists such as the Russian- American artist Alexander Ney .

In private, Elaine and Willem de Kooning had a difficult marriage that was characterized by latent poverty in the 1940s and years of violent excesses of alcohol, love affairs and constant discrepancies between the two opposing characters. Nevertheless, the unfortunate liaison resulted in high artistic productivity, which resulted in a large number of works by both artists. In the late 1950s, Elaine and Willem de Kooning separated but did not get divorced. It wasn't until the mid-1970s, when both had overcome their alcohol problems, that they found each other again. From 1976 Elaine de Kooning painted with acrylic paints for the first time and developed new forms of expression in her pictures. She toured Europe in the 1980s , where she was inspired by cave paintings in southern France , as well as China and Japan . She then began to experiment with ink drawings and etchings in which she implemented these impressions ( Ascending Wall 1988). At the end of the 1980s, the heavy smoker fell ill with lung cancer, which she succumbed to on February 1, 1989; a few months earlier she had been elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design .

In iconography , Elaine de Kooning's work is influenced by many different artistic styles : it ranges from gloomy abstractions in the 1940s, portrait studies in the 1950s and 1960s to a liberated archaic-expressionist and traditional representationalism in the 1980s, which critics also call New York Figurative Expressionism was declared. In addition to Helen Frankenthaler , Lee Krasner , Joan Mitchell and Hedda Sterne , Elaine de Kooning was one of the leading artists of Abstract Expressionism in the USA.

Works

(Selection of external web links)

Exhibitions (selection)

  • Elaine De Kooning (2003) Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco
  • Abstract Expressionism (2001) Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern
  • Elaine de Kooning Portraits (1999) Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York
  • Art & Friendship: Selections from the Roland F. Pease Collection (1997) Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
  • Elaine de Kooning Paintings 1955-1965 (1996) Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York
  • Major Paintings, Sculpture & Drawings (1996) Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York

Fonts

  • The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism Selected Writings. George Braziller Inc., New York 1994, ISBN 0-8076-1337-1
  • Elaine De Kooning: Essays by Lawrence Campbell, Helen a Harrison, Rose Slivka. University of Georgia Georgia Museum, 1992, ISBN 0-915977-09-5

literature

  • Edvard Lieber: Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio . Harry N. Abrams, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8109-4560-6
  • Marika Herskovic: American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork, and Biographies. New York School Press, New York 2003, ISBN 0-9677994-1-4
  • Marika Herskovic: New York School Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice by Artists: A Complete Documentation of the New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals. New York School Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-9677994-0-6
  • Lee Hall: Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine De Kooning: Portrait of a Marriage. HarperCollins, 1995, ISBN 0-06-018305-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "D" / de Kooning, Elaine NA 1988 ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on June 20, 2015)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
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personal data
SURNAME Kooning, Elaine de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fried, Elaine Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American abstract expressionist painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 1989
Place of death Southampton (New York)