This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how the world of art and museums is pushing boundaries.
The celebrated artist Alex Katz, who turned 99 this summer, recently recalled a friend and a major figure of the New York art world, Elaine de Kooning.
“Elaine was like a myth,” said Katz, best known for his stylized portraits. “The more you knew about Elaine, the more amazing she became.”
De Kooning, who died in 1989, was an influential critic, a prolific painter and a founding member of The Club, a members-only meeting place for artists in Greenwich Village. Being married to one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Willem de Kooning, was only part of her legacy.
She had an eye for spotting talent, as when, in 1959, she paid the most Katz had ever received for a painting at the time — he remembered the price as a whopping $150 — from the then-influential Tanager Gallery, where they met for the first time.
The picture was one of Katz’s free-standing cutouts, this one depicting the poet Frank O’Hara. Katz said, “I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a big deal. She is an all-star.’”
Later, de Kooning painted Katz, and one of those portraits — “Alex Katz II” (1967) — is in a just-opened show at Berry Campbell gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The brushwork is confident and not overworked; de Kooning left portions of the canvas untouched, as she often did.
The show, “Elaine de Kooning,” has about 28 works and is a rare extensive spotlight on her artistry since a retrospective of her portraits at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015. Many of the works are for sale, and others are on loan just for the exhibition, which runs through Dec. 19.
There are many portraits, but also pictures more typical of the Abstract Expressionist movement that de Kooning was part of, and helped shape. The biggest work is “California” (1958-60), a multicolored abstraction that is 11 feet wide.
The gallery’s founders, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, have made a point of highlighting female artists of de Kooning’s generation.
“There hasn’t been a full-scale retrospective to show the through line of her work,” Campbell said. That connective tissue, she added, was “Abstract Expressionist brushwork,” a technique “which let her unite everything she loved.”
De Kooning’s work is in the collections of major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is shown in exhibitions like “Abstract Expressionism: The East End, 1940 to Today,” currently at the Parrish Museum of Art in Water Mill, N.Y. (until Feb. 14). That show features “Sunday Afternoon, Juarez” (1958), a bullfight-inspired abstraction.
De Kooning is also featured in the traveling exhibition “Abstract Expressionists: The Women,” which this fall is on view at the Grinnell College Museum of Art in Grinnell, Iowa (through Jan. 3).
Despite an auction record of just over $1 million for “Charge” (1960), set in 2022, de Kooning’s reputation has always been complicated by that of her famous husband, and in her day it may have been overshadowed by the impact of her own writing.
In the book “Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art,” Mary Gabriel wrote that artists of the time believed that de Kooning’s work as a critic was “fundamental” to understanding modern painting.
Thomas Hess, an editor of de Kooning’s at Art News and a friend, is the subject of a 1963 portrait on display in the Berry Campbell show. He is pictured with a flurry of dramatic brushstrokes bursting out behind him like a multicolored corona.
A nephew of de Kooning’s, Chris Luyckx, is the source for most of the pictures being sold, and he is depicted in three of the show’s works. One of them — a painting of him as child dressed up in a cowboy outfit, “Jemp #1” (1963) — he will keep for himself, but he has lent it to the gallery for the exhibition.
“Elaine has not had a substantial show in a number of years, and it’s time to bring her back into the light,” Luyckx said.
Luyckx was “super close” with his aunt, he said. “She was quite the character, and bigger than life for most of us. She was a woman of action — she expressed that with her painting, her writing and her generosity.”
Known as both direct and impatient, in Luyckx’s words, she had a certain presence.
“I liked the way she would put a cigarette in her mouth and wait for someone to light it,” Katz recalled.
In the early 1960s, de Kooning got a commission from the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum to paint a portrait of President John F. Kennedy, who sat for her in Palm Beach in sessions that stretched over two weeks. De Kooning eventually produced hundreds of drawings, paintings and sketches, several of which are in the Berry Campbell show.
In “Ninth Street Women,” Gabriel wrote that de Kooning was working on the portrait when she found out Kennedy had been shot; she wrote the date Nov. 22, 1963, on the work, “put down her brush and did not pick it up again for a year.”
Another portrait subject was the artist and restaurateur Toni Ross (a co-founder of Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton), who sat for de Kooning three times. One of the portraits is in the Berry Campbell show, and Ross has one in her personal collection.
“She had such a deep understanding of her sitters,” said Ross, who in her 20s received important mentoring from the older artist, who welcomed her into a coterie of female artists in the Hamptons and helped her find a house and studio.
De Kooning was born Elaine Fried and grew up in Brooklyn. She attended Hunter College and then left to seek an art career, studying at different art schools and becoming part of the downtown scene.
She met Willem de Kooning, an artist 14 years her senior, in the late 1930s, and married him in 1943. Theirs was a complicated but wildly productive relationship. They separated in the late 1950s but reconciled some 20 years later.
“They were both intense artists and needed their own space to do their own work,” Luyckx said.
De Kooning fostered her husband’s talent and career while also pursuing her own artistic vision — a not uncommon dual track for 20th-century female artists, including her contemporary, Lee Krasner, who was the wife of Jackson Pollock. (That couple is the subject of a current Met exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous.”)
“Elaine took the role as wife of Willem very seriously,” Campbell said. “She helped promote his work, and some people viewed her as wife of, rather than the great artist she was.”
Nurturing was part of a defining personality trait. “She elevated people through her art criticism, and she elevated people through her portraiture,” Campbell said.
In the late 1940s, de Kooning began one of her most famous series, known as the “gyroscopes” and later as the “Faceless Men,” energetically painted figures whose faces are blurred or obscured, with more focus on the clothes and surroundings.
Some of the Berry Campbell show’s earliest works are contemporaneous with that series, but very different in style, including “Black Mountain #10” (1948), an abstraction done while both de Koonings were at Black Mountain College in North Carolina for a summer.
The forms reflect the influence of the artist Arshile Gorky, and it features a distinct shade of pink that her husband also favored. “You can see she’s sharing the paints with Willem,” Berry said.
Some of the latest works in the show are watercolors of horses that stem from de Kooning’s interest in the oldest known artworks, particularly in the last decade of her life. “She had a passion for cave painting,” said Ross, who visited the caves of Altamira in Spain with de Kooning to see the prehistoric art, with its animal subjects.
“Towards the end of her life, she’s thinking about art history, and her place there,” Berry said.
As far as the reputations of de Kooning and the women who were her contemporaries, Berry said that, so far, the art world seems to have a limited attention span, selecting a single artist to lavish attention on, but only for a time.
“It’s like only one woman at a time can get the spotlight,” Berry said, adding, “Hopefully this is Elaine’s moment.”
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