Twenty-one-year-old art student Elaine Marie Fried moved into the West Twenty-second Street loft of Willem de Kooning in 1939, two years after she had met the artist and not long after she has begun her artistic career working in a social realist vein. She explained the amount of time spent away from her Brooklyn home by telling her parents that she was taking private drawing lessons from the thirty-four-year-old Dutchman. While true, this was by no means the whole story! Subsequently, however, she attributed her assurance as a portrait painter to those intense lessons, in which Willem insisted on linear precision and careful, articulate modeling. In this self-portrait at age twenty-seven, she reveals not only her skill as a draftsman, but also her debt to the stylistic interests of Willem in the early 1940s.

Convinced that de Kooning, whom she married in 1943, was "the most important person I would ever know," Elaine's energies in the 1940s and 1950s were to a large extent diverted to championing her husband's career. She used her considerable personal talents to both enlarge the circle of artists who came to admire Willem's work and to introduce him to the critics, such as Harold Rosenberg and Tom Hess, whose writings would enhance his reputation. While she exhibited from time to time during this period, her own career did not flourish until she and Willem separated in 1957.

Self-portrait
Oil on Masonite, 1946
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
NPG.94.81
© Elaine de Kooning Trust

Enlarged image

NPG Home Page | NPG Current Exhibitions
© 2002 Smithsonian Institution