A show at the Berry Campbell gallery in Manhattan offers a rare extensive examination of work by the artist, whose reputation has always been complicated by that of her famous husband.
The celebrated artist Alex Katz, who turned 99 this summer, recently recalled a friend and a major figure of the New York art world, Elaine de Kooning.
“Elaine was like a myth,” said Katz, best known for his stylized portraits. “The more you knew about Elaine, the more amazing she became.”
De Kooning, who died in 1989, was an influential critic, a prolific painter and a founding member of The Club, a members-only meeting place for artists in Greenwich Village. Being married to one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Willem de Kooning, was only part of her legacy.
She had an eye for spotting talent, as when, in 1959, she paid the most Katz had ever received for a painting at the time — he remembered the price as a whopping $150 — from the then-influential Tanager Gallery, where they met for the first time.
The picture was one of Katz’s free-standing cutouts, this one depicting the poet Frank O’Hara. Katz said, “I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a big deal. She is an all-star.’”
Later, de Kooning painted Katz, and one of those portraits — “Alex Katz II” (1967) — is in a just-opened show at Berry Campbell gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The brushwork is confident and not overworked; de Kooning left portions of the canvas untouched, as she often did.
The show, “Elaine de Kooning,” has about 28 works and is a rare extensive spotlight on her artistry since a retrospective of her portraits at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015. Many of the works are for sale, and others are on loan just for the exhibition, which runs through Dec. 19.
— Ted Loos, The New York Times
