Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried (1918-1989) enrolled at Hunter College in 1936 but left soon thereafter to pursue art. In 1937, she began attending the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on the Lower East Side, where she was introduced to Willem de Kooning and other prominent artists, including Arshile Gorky and Milton Resnick. She transferred to the American Artists School in 1938 and in 1939 moved into Willem's studio at 156 West Twenty-Second Street. The two were married in 1943. Willem and Elaine were invited to the summer session at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948, where Elaine studied color theory and geophysics with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. In 1949, she attended Hans Hofmann's Provincetown summer school.
By the mid-to-late 1940s, Elaine de Kooning was painting ambitious abstractions and writing some of the most lucid art criticism of her generation. As an editorial associate at Art News under Thomas Hess, she produced foundational essays on Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Franz Kline, essays that helped bring Abstract Expressionism to a broader audience as the movement was taking shape. As a charter member of The Club at 39 East Eighth Street, Elaine de Kooning was included in several landmark group exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Artist: Man and Wife at Sidney Janis Gallery (1951); Talent 1950, a selection by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro at Kootz Gallery, NY; the Ninth Street Show (1951); Young American Painters at the Museum of Modern Art (1957); Artists of the New York School: Second Generation at The Jewish Museum, NY (1957); and 60 American Painters: Abstract Expressionist Painting of the Fifties at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1960). She participated in all Stable Gallery annuals from 1953 to 1957.
Beginning in the 1950s, frequent trips to the Texas Panhandle brought Elaine de Kooning a renewed sense of independence. The electrically charged, sweeping gestures of her abstract series of paintings, animated by bullfights created between 1958 and 1963, drew inspiration from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; the wild energy and panoramic sunsets of the southwestern high plains and canyons soon infused her reddish-brown palette with a warm, vibrant translucency.
By the early 1960s, Elaine de Kooning's reputation as a portraitist rivaled her standing as an abstractionist. She was included in the Whitney Annual in 1961 and, in 1962, received one of the most consequential portrait commissions in American art: John F. Kennedy. The resulting works remain among her most celebrated.
In 1976, struck by the monumental physicality of a bronze statuary at the Jardin du Luxembourg, Elaine de Kooning began a Bacchus-inspired figural series of abstractly clustered bodies in nature. In 1983 and 1984, another large series, Time of the Bison, explored the migrations of bison, horses, and deer after exhilarating visits to the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in the French Pyrenees and Altamira, Spain. Throughout these later series, Elaine de Kooning continued to bridge gestural abstraction and figuration, uniting landscapes, bodies, animals and mythological subjects through her unmistakably expressive brushwork.
Teaching became another focal point of her career. She held appointments at the University of New Mexico (1958-1959), the New York Studio School Summer Program in Paris (1974), Parsons School of Design (1974-1976), Cooper Union (1976), Bard College (1982), and numerous other institutions, receiving several honorary doctorates.
Elaine de Kooning is represented in many important private and public collections throughout the country, including the Denver Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.