INTERRUPCIÓN || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Elaine de Kooning (American painter) 1918 - 1989
aka Elaine Fried de Kooning
Self-portrait, 1946
oil on masonite
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. , United States of America

In the mid 1940s, Elaine and Willem were poorer than ever, and both were experiencing great difficulty in selling any work. In an effort to make money, de Kooning painted this realist self-portrait and sold it to her sister for a sum of $20, which she described at the time as "good money." The pseudo-abstract touches in this otherwise classical portrait are very much in the style of artist Fairfield Porter, who was a close friend of the de Koonings.

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Twenty-one-year-old art student Elaine Marie Fried moved into the West Twenty-second Street loft of Willem de Kooning in 1939, two years after she had met the artist and not long after she has begun her artistic career working in a social realist vein. She explained the amount of time spent away from her Brooklyn home by telling her parents that she was taking private drawing lessons from the thirty-four-year-old Dutchman. While true, this was by no means the whole story! Subsequently, however, she attributed her assurance as a portrait painter to those intense lessons, in which Willem insisted on linear precision and careful, articulate modeling. In this self-portrait at age twenty-seven, she reveals not only her skill as a draftsman, but also her debt to the stylistic interests of Willem in the early 1940s.

Convinced that de Kooning, whom she married in 1943, was "the most important person I would ever know," Elaine's energies in the 1940s and 1950s were to a large extent diverted to championing her husband's career. She used her considerable personal talents to both enlarge the circle of artists who came to admire Willem's work and to introduce him to the critics, such as Harold Rosenberg and Tom Hess, whose writings would enhance his reputation. While she exhibited from time to time during this period, her own career did not flourish until she and Willem separated in 1957.

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Elaine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era and editorial associate for Art News magazine. On December 9, 1943, she married painter Willem de Kooning.
She was born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents were Mary Ellen O'Brien and Charles Frank Fried. She was the oldest of four children. They lived in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn. Her artistic endeavors were supported by her mother, who took her to museums and taught her to draw what she saw. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, she briefly attended Hunter College in New York City. Then, 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.
In 1985 she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1988.
De Kooning died on February 1, 1989, in Southampton, New York, a year after having a lung removed due to lung cancer.