Elaine de Kooning at Washburn - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Lawrence Campbell

Portraiture was an art Elaine de Kooning always did on the side. In her long career, she received only two portrait commissions: one of President Kennedy for the Truman Library, the other of Pele, the Brazilian soccer star. When the Saturday Evening Post asked if the magazine could reproduce one of her Kennedy paintings on its cover, Elaine de Kooning refused, explaining that she didn't want to make a cent from any of her portraits.

Although she regarded portraiture as marginal to her main ambitions as a painter, she was nonetheless fascinated by it. Most of Elaine de Kooning's portraits were of her friends. The primary reason for painting them was because they were her friends and not because they happened to be well known in the art world. It was as though she searched for souls which, in the act of painting, she was able to fit into bodies. In her lifetime there was only one exhibition of her portraits, in 1963. After her death in 1991, Brooklyn College staged a complete retrospective of these works.

The recent show concentrated on a key period between the mid-1940s and the mid-'50s when her style developed from a near-Victorian precision to test the freedoms of expressionist gestural painting. In a 1946 Self Portrait (recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery), she depicts herself seated on an oddly shaped Thonet chair; the chair back is shaped like a heart, echoing the handle of a cruet on the table before her. Elaine de Kooning looks out at the world as though from a tunnel made by her hair. The mood is hushed and mysterious; the colors are a quiet feast of grays and browns.

By the 1950s the paint has thickened and is flowing independently of the image. It obscures the face of Fairfield Porter (1954) but flashes into particularity on the forehead. Porter sits bolt upright astride a chair, as though ready to spring for the exit. In Tom Hess, 1956, the paint wedges and squeezes the figure, all except the face, which looks out like a proud tower.

As is evident in the drawings in this show, Willem de Kooning was an exceptionally handsome man, but this quality is sacrificed to the needs of two painted portraits. In Bill at St. Marks (1956), we make out a seated figure that seems to be broken into three parts, like a giant beetle. The interest is not in the figure but in the swinging, surging, shuffling and scurrying of planes and brushstrokes. Harold Rosenberg (1956) is a life-sized croquis, perhaps not as good a painting as the others, although in some ways more interesting as a record. We see the sitter asprawl in a chair, a cigarette in one hand, a glass in the other, with legs and feet shooting out towards the viewer. The head, which appears as though seen from a great distance, wears an expression of semi-humorous ferocity, like a tiger glowering from its lair.