Yet de Kooning also worked to carve out a niche for herself as an artist among New York’s avant garde, and painting portraits was one way to accomplish that. “[Willem] just always thought that the portraits were pictures that girls made, so I made portraits,” she told Lee Hall, one of her biographers. “I had that area free; I had to do it myself; I didn’t have to make decisions. I knew I was going to make a portrait and it didn’t much matter of whom; once you are set to make a portrait, you’re free to make a painting.”
But painting men (and a few women) was also a pleasure—a way for the artist to become intimately acquainted with her subjects. “Her portraits were done out of passion, especially when it came to men. She loved men. You see the greater spontaneity and certainty and a much stronger sense of gesture in her paintings of men,” says Jim Levis, who represents her estate. De Kooning had no shortage of male friends (or lovers), and many were as culturally relevant as Willem, or Bill, as he was known, who she married in 1943. Artist
, poet
, dealer Leo Castelli, critic Harold Rosenberg, artist
, and poet
are among the men de Kooning brought to life in full-length or seated portraits, distilling each sitter’s character while energizing the canvas with the bold colors and rapid brush strokes typical of the
. Those portraits now serve as a visual archive of a major moment in New York’s history not only because of who they show, but because of the Abstract Expressionist style in which they’re painted.
Like her more abstract-leaning compatriots, de Kooning was trying to get at something visceral beneath the surface. She was interested in capturing the nuances of body language, and by blurring facial features, she could shift attention away from the eyes and toward the body. A portrait of her close friend, New York School poet Frank O’Hara, is one such example. “First I painted the whole structure of his face,” de Kooning once explained of the work, “then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there.”
“She wanted to capture the pose of the whole person, the way you’d see someone from a distance and know who they were,” says Brandon Fortune, chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and organizer of the 2015 exhibition “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits,” one of the rare museum exhibitions over the years to focus on the artist’s work. And while “she liked to think of herself as a painter first, not as a woman painter,” says Fortune, de Kooning was certainly wise to the implications of turning the tables on the male gaze. In her essay for the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition catalog, Fortune quotes the artist’s comment to an interviewer in 1987: “[In the past] women painted women:
,
, and so forth. And I thought, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects.”