Elaine de Kooning Is the Subject At the Pollock-Krasner House
The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “Elaine de Kooning Portrayed,” a show that will include portraits of the artist both by her hand and those of others beginning next Thursday.
Through her own work as an artist and writer and her long association with her husband, Willem de Kooning, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Ms. de Kooning enjoyed many artistic friendships. The evidence can be seen in the show’s various images of her by artists such as Alex Katz, Robert De Niro Sr., Hedda Sterne, Fairfield Porter, and Arshile Gorky.
As Phyllis Braff wrote in her exhibition essay, “the portraits yield insight into the social fabric at a time when the New York art world was comparatively small, and frequent interactions nourished talent and determination.”
The exhibition is loosely tied to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Elaine de Kooning Portraits” on view through the end of the year. In a film included in the National Portrait Gallery show, “Elaine de Kooning Paints a Portrait,” she said the paintings that attracted her in the major museums she visited were always the portraits. “I’m fascinated by them, but I also find them rather repellent.”
She said could see the same struggles in other artists’ work that she experienced in her own portraits, but she also called them an invasion, not only of the sitters’ privacy, but her own. “I almost feel my portraits, portraits I’ve made, are now invading my privacy. When I have them around‚ to have all these people looking at me, it’s oppressive.”
The works in the show are mostly sketches on paper, but there are some significant paintings by her as well as by Porter, Katz, and Edvins Strautmanis. A sketch by Willem de Kooning in the 1940s is included, as is a 2011 abstract tribute to her by Paul Harris. There are straightforward portraits, extreme closeups, and even tributes to both de Koonings, as in the Strautmanis work “Elaine de Kooning as Woman I,” painted in 1977. Ray Johnson knew Ms. de Kooning from his 1948 summer stay at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He is represented by a collage and drawing commemorating her death.
Porter and Elaine de Kooning were colleagues at ARTnews as well as kindred spirits as painters. He “was an acquaintance of the couple by 1939, and was attracted by their talent, openness to history, and commitment to study the way direct vision serves the artist,” Ms. Braff said.
In the mid-to-late-20th-century debates regarding figuration and abstraction, the de Koonings found themselves “believers in a more expansive view of the avant garde,” Ms. Braff wrote. Their ability to embrace and transcend both doctrines gained them the wide group of friends and acquaintances demonstrated in this narrowly devoted group show, on view through Oct. 31.