Elaine de Kooning: A Fusion of Ideas

Elaine de Kooning - Self-Portrait #3 - 1946 - Oil on masonite - 75.6 x 57.5cm (29 3/4 x 22 5/8”) - National Portrait Gallery - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) was a prolific artist, art critic, portraitist, and teacher during the height of the Abstract Expressionists era and well beyond. Much of her art fused abstraction with mythology, primitive imagery, and realism. Her work continues to receive increasing critical attention as she was, without question, also one of the most important artists, writers, and teachers to have worked in the 20th century. She was particularly noted for her witty, perceptive analyses of a wide range of art.

While Elaine did use gestural brushstrokes in most of her work, much in the tradition of the "action" painters, her work was figurative and representational, to some degree, and thus rarely as purely abstract as some of her closest contemporaries.

In the mid 1940s, Elaine and her husband, Willem de Kooning, were poorer than ever, and both were experiencing great difficulty in selling any work. In an effort to make money, Elaine painted the realist self-portrait featured here, and sold it to her sister for a sum of $20. She described it, at the time, as "good money." The pseudo-abstract touches in this otherwise classical portrait are very much in the style of artist Fairfield Porter, who was a close friend of the de Koonings, and whose portrait Elaine also painted.