A major exhibition of Elaine de Kooning’s work will open at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York on October 29th, spanning four decades of the Abstract Expressionist’s career from 1948 to 1988. It is the first major solo presentation of her work since the National Portrait Gallery’s 2015–2016 exhibition “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits,” and many of the works, including paintings and works on paper, have not been shown publicly since the artist’s death.
Among the highlights are paintings from De Kooning’s John F. Kennedy series, made after she was commissioned in 1962 to paint an official presidential portrait for the Harry S. Truman Library. The artist was given access to Kennedy during his winter stays in Palm Beach, Florida, in late 1962 and early 1963, but found that his constant motion—reading papers, taking calls, shifting in his chair—made a conventional single sitting impossible. Instead, she worked from rapid sketches, later telling ARTnews that she required “absolute immobility of the sitter,” which the president rarely gave her. By her own account, published in Life magazine in 1964, the process ultimately produced “hundreds of sketches and 23 finished paintings.” Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 halted her work on the series; she later described the year she’d spent painting him as “real trauma.”
– Kaite White, Artsy
