Elizabeth de Cuevas of Amagansett and New York City, who used the name Strong-Cuevas as an artist, died on March 19 at her Manhattan apartment. She was 94 and had been unwell for only a few days.
Strong-Cuevas was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not far from Paris, on Jan. 22, 1929, the daughter of George de Cuevas, an enthusiastic Chilean impresario who founded Le Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, and Margaret Strong de Cuevas. She grew up in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Florence, and New York City. In Europe, she was exposed to beauty both natural and artistic and later said she believed it was the scale of the architecture she saw as a child in Florence that inspired her trajectory toward large sculptural forms.
She credited her mother’s family, in which there had been several Protestant divines — Northern Baptist ministers — for having passed on to her the ability to think and reflect, especially in wider, more universal terms, and for her artistic gifts.
After two years at Vassar, in 1948, she married Hubert Faure, a French businessman, and lived with him in Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne for a couple of years. Once back in the States, she took a degree as a day student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., and then studied differential and integral calculus at Columbia University for a year. She and Mr. Faure divorced after 10 years but stayed close friends.
In 1960, she married Joel Carmichael, a writer. They had a daughter, Deborah, and divorced after five years but remained on good terms.
“Over the course of her life, she met many extraordinary people from all over the world,” her family said. Among them were Salvador Dali, the poet and critic Edith Sitwell, and the fashion designer Charles James, whom she met when she was 13 and was close to until his death.
She had lifelong friends whom she had known since childhood and also had enduring friendships with a diverse group of people in East Hampton and New York.
Strong-Cuevas studied sculpture with John Hovannes at the Art Students League of New York. She started by carving in stone, and then, in the 1970s, when she met the sculptor Marcel (Toto) Meylan she began with his help to execute her ideas for sculpture on a large scale. Mr. Meylan worked with her to create the intricate armatures supporting the plaster originals for her five “Heads” with movable profiles. The pieces were then cast in stainless steel at the Polich Tallix Foundry, founded by Dick Polich. Strong-Cuevas worked with Mr. Meylan through the 1980s, and between 1980 and 2018, she had many other large-scale pieces cast at Polich Tallix, some in bronze and some in stainless steel. The craftspeople there, Vanessa Hoheb, Jerry Tobin, Tina Calabrese, and Amy Montegari, were valued collaborators and friends.
During that time she met the fabricators Michael Cain and Mark Briscoe, who welded numerous monumental editions in aluminum or stainless steel based on the smaller models she sculpted with her own hands in wax.
Strong-Cuevas published two books with Abrams — one of her sculpture, the other of her drawings — and a third, self-published, describing the creation of her five “Heads.”
Stephen Loschen, an artist who was Strong-Cuevas’s assistant for 33 years, said he had “lost an incredibly close friend. She was so focused, driven, such a fantastic mind, full of drama, and who always left time for a good laugh.”
She was also interested in yoga, which she started learning in her 20s with Sachindra Majumdar and continued throughout her life, as well as cosmology, astrology, finance, and language. She loved the theater, dancing, and music of all kinds, from Beethoven to Motown.
Since 1977 she had numerous New York solo exhibitions at galleries including Lee Ault & Company, Iolas-Jackson, Island Weiss, and Leonard Tourné. In 1998, in a show mediated by Evelyn Bourricaud, 40 of her pieces were shown at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, N.J. The sculpture park still owns several of her largest pieces. Strong-Cuevas also participated in group shows in Europe and this country. Last summer 15 pieces, many of them monumental, were shown at the Southampton Arts Center as part of a three-person show initiated by the award-winning documentary filmmaker Lana Jokel. In 2002, Ms. Jokel directed a documentary about Strong-Cuevas, followed by a sequel in 2021. Both films can be seen at lanajokel.com.
Her work is also at Guild Hall, the Bruce Museum in Connecticut, the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, and in a number of private collections.
Known for her linguistic skill, she felt strongly about precision in whatever language she was speaking. She spoke the English of the expatriate British who were living in Florence at the turn of the 20th century, where her mother grew up and where she lived as a child. She also spoke Spanish, Italian, and a smattering of German, which she enjoyed learning until shortly before her death.
She was admired for her style and for her ageless beauty, her family said. She wore bold silver jewelry, enormous rings on her small hands, and strong blue and red colors. “She is elegant to the bottom of her soul,” her lifelong friend Alexander Romanov said.
“She was such a positive force and such fun to be with,” said another friend, Jane Maynard. “We had such fun together, especially singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way,’ a tradition we started on Christmas Day in New York.”
Strong-Cuevas is survived by her daughter, Deborah Carmichael of New York and Amagansett. Her brother, John de Cuevas, died in 2018. Also surviving are her niece, Margaret de Cuevas of Baltimore and Amagansett, her great-nieces Alida and Helen Schott of Baltimore, her former sister-in-law, Sylvia de Cuevas of New York and Amagansett, her brother’s widow, Sue de Cuevas of Cambridge, and her stepdaughter and stepson, Isabel Carmichael of East Hampton and Dr. David Carmichael of New York, all of whom she was close to.
“She’s a strong personality, very intelligent, very opinionated, and theatrical like her father, but a wonderful, loving, and loyal friend without whose support I wouldn’t have survived,” her brother had written.
Strong-Cuevas’s work will continue to be maintained at her studio in Amagansett. It can be seen at sc-sculpture.com. A book, titled “Moments,” that she wrote with her daughter’s help in the last three years of her life, will be published soon.
Her body was cremated. There will be a memorial in New York City at a time and place to be decided, as well as a celebration of her life this summer in Amagansett.
In an essay she wrote in 2013 for Art Times, Strong-Cuevas said, “In sum, my work refers to outward exploration and inner meditation. I feel so lucky to have been given what I think is a mission to impart certain ideas. To this day, I can say: ‘Oh, what a delicious life!’ ”
