Elaine Fried de Kooning
 Elaine
Fried was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York and spent her
childhood studying the lives of artists and visiting the museums and
galleries of New York City. She was stimulated by her mother's
enthusiasm for art. Her mother took her to museums, gave her books
on art, and suggested to her daughter to draw what she saw. Even
before she entered high school Elaine knew she wanted to be a
painter. After high school she attended the American Artists School
and the Leonardo da Vinci School and was swept up in the cultural
excitement in New York of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1938,
Elaine was introduced to a Dutch immigrant artist,
Willem de
Kooning. She soon began studying with him, and approximately five
years later, on December 9, 1943, they married. While her artistic
reputation was eclipsed to some degree by his fame, she was able to
forge a name as an artist and as a critic They were the typical
artist couple in the 1940's, struggling with serious financial
hardships while producing tremendously innovative work. By the early
1950's she was producing stylized paintings based on news
photographs of sports figures. She was also an art critic for Artnews and wrote articles about American Modernist painters.
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 Elaine
continued her studies while occasionally working as an artist’s model,
and had her first solo show in 1952. Through the following decades, her
career would be varied and full of diverse influences. While she
remained connected to the New York School of
Abstract Expressionists,
she also claimed that "style is something I've always tried to avoid.
I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style
is applied or imposed on it.". Elaine's painting style is characterized
by a deft line coupled with realist compression and emotionally charged
abandon. Her subjects ranged from early still life to portraiture, and
finally to
purely abstract paintings executed during the fifties. She held guest
professorships at Yale and Carnegie Mellon University. Her most famous series of portraits, painted
on commission from the White House, is of U.S. president John F.
Kennedy. Kennedy was generally too busy to pose, however, so de
Kooning observed him from various vantage points while he tended to
business. Often, while de Kooning herself worked, President Kennedy’s
very young daughter Caroline kept pace by creating her own small
paintings by de Kooning’s side. She traveled to West Palm Beach, Florida, to make
painted sketches of Kennedy and spent much of 1963 working on a
presidential portrait of him for the Truman Library . Kennedy
was assassinated during the creation of this work. His murder impacted
her to such a degree that she stopped painting for nearly a
year. She spent most of this time teaching and doing sculptures. |
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 In
the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning used the Abstract Expressionist style
of "action painting" to create sexually- charged images of men. In Fairfield Porter #1, 1954, de Kooning pushes the seated
faceless figure to the foreground, confronting
the viewer with his open-legged stance; an invitation to visually
consume his sexualized body. The de Koonings' intimate relationship was a complex and vibrant
one. Both developed significant problems with alcohol during the
late forties, and lived apart from the late fifties through the mid
seventies. However, they never divorced. Their deep emotional ties
drew them back together in 1976, when Elaine overcame her alcoholism
and helped Willem on his own path to sobriety. Artistically, the
eighties was perhaps the most prolific decade for them both. De Kooning’s quick wit and fast and free method of painting often turned the
effort of creating art into an interactive salon, artist considered themselves fortunate enough to
be around to participate. When she wasn’t working on portraits, her subject
matter ranged from baseball to Bacchus -- the Roman god of wine and wild living
-- to the famed cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Though Willem de Kooning’s artistic persona tended to overwhelm Elaine’s, Elaine
herself insisted that she did not feel like she was painting in Willem’s shadow,
but rather in “his light.” |
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 The first of her immense canvases in
the Bacchus series, based on a nineteenth-century sculpture
she saw in the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris, France, were
painted in her studio on the UGA campus during her tenure as
Dodd Visiting Professor, from 1976 to 1978. In 1977 De
Kooning spent the summer in Cortona, Italy, with the UGA
Study Abroad program. Over the course of her career, she
taught at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the
University of California, Davis; Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Yale University Graduate School
in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Parsons School of Design
in New York City, among others. Her paintings are in the
collections of major museums, including the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York, the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, and the National
Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. |
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