The National Portrait Gallery's Warren Perry discusses a 1946 self portrait by Elaine de Kooning.

 

As an artist and as a critic, Elaine de Kooning spanned the seemingly unbridgeable gap between abstraction and representation. In a groundbreaking 1955 essay, she argued that the battle to legitimize abstract art was won, and it was now time to stop denigrating those artists who reintroduced representational elements. A confirmed portraitist, she nonetheless infused her paintings with the energetic, gestural brushstrokes renowned in the work of her husband, Willem. As critic Valerie Petersen noted in 1962, Elaine de Kooning's portraits, exhibiting "a bold synthesis of abstract excitement and the simplicity of gesture peculiar to her subjects," were as much a part of the New York School of painting as the "housepainter's brush and oversized canvases." 

 

Filmed in NPG collections storage, September 2013.

 

 

Elaine de Kooning Self-Portrait / Oil on Masonite, 1946 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © Elaine de Kooning Trust