Elaine de Kooning

As both artist and critic, de Kooning bridged the division between art and writing, helping to introduce the wider world to the artists of the New York School. Frequently visiting museums and galleries in New York, she began to draw at 5 and sold portraits of her classmates at school. Initially studying math at Hunter College, she soon left to pursue art and studied at the American Artists School where she also worked as a life model.

While her early work consisted of charcoal sketches and watercolors, she soon began to fuse abstraction with representation, reinventing the portrait by using an action-like gestural style and creating a body of work that is never purely abstraction nor realism.

She translated through words her analyses of paintings and reviewed shows for the publication ARTnews, writing over 100 articles and being one of the earliest critics to write about Abstract Expressionism. As an artist herself she was able to discuss art with the sensitivity and perspective of someone who was a maker.

After marrying Willem de Kooning in 1943, she used her position at ARTnews and within the art world to promote his work despite it overshadowing her own, something which her contemporaries heavily criticised. Although, always fiercely independent, she insisted that she did not work in his shadow, instead, she painted in his light.

De Koooning was crucial to the success of Abstract Expressionism and shifting the art world capital to New York during and after World War II. Her role as a founding member of The Club, the group of artists who met at 39 East 8th Street, and being one of only eleven women (amongst seventy-two men) included in the Ninth Street Show, marks her presence and involvement in one of the most important moments in art history.

She was a painter of Abstract Expressionism, Figurative Expressionism and Naturalism, of portraits, landscapes and still lifes, she was a writer, critic and publicist; by refusing to be defined by a single label in pursuit of her passion she defied the gender roles of her time and forged her own path into art history.