In the history books, Elaine de Kooning is often eclipsed by her husband, the famed painter Willem. This fate befell the women in the Abstract Expressionist movement, including Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, who became known as the “Ninth Street Women,” all of whom received their flowers after decades of being overshadowed by their male counterparts. But you simply cannot tell the story of mid-century art—and Abstract Expressionism—without Elaine.
De Kooning, who died in 1989 at 70, sat at the epicenter of the art world for five decades. She deftly balanced two parallel practices in portraiture and abstract expressionism, unafraid to allow these genres to intermingle. Beyond her painting, she founded the artist collective The Club in Greenwich Village and wrote art criticism for Art News, celebrating artists like Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. President John F. Kennedy, New York artist Toni Ross, former Art News editor-in-chief Thomas Hess, and American painter Alex Katz are among the artist’s impressive roster of sitters. A number of these portraits currently hang at New York’s Berry Campbell gallery. Each image frames its subject with expressive brushwork and vivid, bright colors. Among these works, most featuring starry figures, is a young boy in a cowboy hat, featured in the painting Jemp #1 (1963). This little kid is De Kooning’s nephew, and the reason the show exists.
— Maxwell Rabb, Harper's Bazaar
