Excerpt from Elaine de Kooning "Escape Artist"
By Cathy Curtis
For years, the downtown artists working in what would come to be called Abstract Expressionism gathered in cafeterias to talk and argue, nursing a single cup of coffee until management threw them out. To remedy this untenable situation, the sculptor Philip Pavia came up with the idea of an artists’ clubhouse and found a space to rent on the top floor of a factory building at 39 East 8th Street. With dues paid by the artist members, the Club flourished as a site for lectures and panel discussions followed by drinking and dancing. Elaine joined in 1952, as one of only three women who were early voting members. She immediately became an active participant on panels ranging from “Abstract Expressionism II” to “Problems of the Engaged Artist.” Once, she fearlessly insisted on her opinion during a heated discussion among seventeen male artists about distortion in art.
In the 1950s, Elaine turned her focus to painting male subjects. She was intrigued by the way they seemed to be divided in half by the jacket and trousers of the suits they wore back then and by the way men tended to sit—with legs open or closed or in some in-between position. For many years, all her sitters were people she knew, family members, fellow artists, and young men she met in the neighborhood. Her youngest sibling is the subject of Peter (Peter Fried) (1956, Plate 11). Sitting tightly with legs crossed and laced fingers, he appears wary because of the way his head is angled on his long neck and his darkly encircled eyes. Dancing around him are swaths of color, vestiges of the abstract style Elaine was now relegating to the backgrounds of her paintings.
