Elaine de Kooning: Artist

“When Miss Nochlin says: 'If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.' Well, I think the status quo in the arts is fine as it is - in this country [America] at least, women have exactly the same chance that men do. There are the same schools, museums, galleries, books, art stores. There are no obstacles in the way of a woman becoming a painter or sculptor other than the usual obstacles that any artist has to face.”

Elaine de Kooning

n. p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , Men , Books , School

“I was overjoyed when I was taken to a show of the American Abstract Artists Group in '37. They were all alive and they were American! My escort further interested me when he told me the two best abstract artists in America were not in the show — Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, whom I met a couple of months later — when I began to study with him [with Willem de Kooning]. When Miss Nochlin says, 'What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history,' well, the point is, artists are always choosing their history from day to day and their history follows them as much as it precedes them. Were American artists 'facing up to the reality of their history' when they turned to the School of Paris or to German Expressionism or Dada or Surrealism or de Stijl or the Bauhaus instead of to Copley, Peale, Eakins, Blake or Ryder; was Picasso facing up to the reality of his history when he was snooping around African art for inspiration?”

Elaine de Kooning

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , School , Art , History

“I reacted to Cézanne almost the same way as you [= Rosalyn Drexler ], the first time I saw him when I was 14... Then I saw my first Cezanne and it jolted me. It was a 'Bathers' [Cézanne painted several of them]. I didn't think he drew well at all. I thought the figures looked stiff and wooden, but I was enthralled by it. I knew there was something there that was going to take me a lifetime to understand. What I took to be the crudity of his technique — that opened a door for me. I began to look at everything differently. That was the year [1932] I discovered Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Soutine — I began to go to the Museum of Modern Art every week. At the same time, I loved New Yorker covers — and El Greco. I didn't mind mixing things up. Nobody was going to tell me what to like or what not to like. Until I was 17 I thought all real artists (I didn't count commercial artists) were dead or foreign with the exceptions of Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, whose work I had seen at 'An American Place.”

Elaine de Kooning

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Love , Art , Way , Understanding

“When I was five years old, my mother took me to the Metropolitan. I remember being overwhelmed by the hush — the glamor of the place. Also I used to be mesmerized by the stained-glass windows in church — but it never occurred to me that anyone made them. I thought they were just there, like trees, chairs, houses and the reproductions on the walls at home. I was always drawing, but I didn't make any connection. Then, by the time I was 10 or 11, other kids were asking me for my drawings and were referring to me as an artist. I hadn't given the matter any thought. I just loved to draw. I loved the activity. But when they bestowed the title on me (by then I was reading about artists and going to museums on my own), I thought, oh yes, I'm an artist, and from then on I took it for granted — and I began to compete. I'd read that Raphael had done something by the age of 12 and I'd get very anxious. I became very time-conscious. If I read about someone's great accomplishment at the age of 20, I'd heave a sigh of relief and feel, maybe theres still time. How did you start?”

Elaine de Kooning

to Rosalyn Drexler
n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Love , Age , Feeling , Home

“Well, first—that term, 'women artists.' I was talking to Joan Mitchell at a party about 10 years ago when a man came up to us and said, 'What do you women artists think…' Joan grabbed my arm and said, 'Elaine, let's get the hell out of here.' That was my first response to Linda Nochlin's article ['Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?']. I was curious about how a man would react. Alex Katz thought it would be a cop-out to answer the piece. Sherman thought it would be a cop-out not to answer it. John Cage thought the question 'divisive and an over-simplification.”

Elaine de Kooning

I agree with all of them.
n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , Hell , Question , Thinking

“I think there are too damn many institutions on the face of the earth as it is. Robert Graves said: 'As soon as women organize themselves in the male way with societies, memberships and rules, everything goes wrong.' I think that applies to artists, too. The artist stands for everything against institutions.. [Rosalyn Drexler reacted: 'Institutions and clear thought are opposites. You can't have one with the other']. Right! Institution to me means authority, coercion, mindlessness, bureaucracy; it means the Pentagon, the CIA, the army, organized denominational religion, prisons, mental hospitals.”

Elaine de Kooning

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , Religion , Way , Thinking

“I always say I'm an escape artist, Style is something I've always tried to avoid. I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it.”

Elaine de Kooning

in 'Sketches for a Series', interview with art-critic Rose Slivka; as quoted in 'Elaine de Kooning, Artist and Teacher, Dies at 68', New York Times, Grace Glueck, February 2, 1989
1972 - 1989

“In shows selected by artists where there is no consciousness of sex, as in the American Abstract Artist Shows which began in the late 1930's or the Artists Annuals of the early 1950's, the ratio [between male and female artists presented there] seemed to be between one third and one quarter women. The only way to arrive at a true ratio, I suppose, would again be to have artist-juried shows.”

Elaine de Kooning

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists' - Rosalyn Drexler with Elaine de Kooning (1971)

Women , Sex , Way

“Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a bride who has never done any housework raving about her first vacuum cleaner. It's just not news." (Yet she confessed that the experience prompted her to deviate from a more controlled linear style and work freely with lively, confrontational colors directly influenced by the Southwest)”

Elaine de Kooning

as quoted on Portrait of the Art world - A Century of art News, Photographs http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/artnews/edekooning.htm], referring to the photo of w:Rudolph Burckhardt's Gelatin silver print, 1960 (printed 2002), Published December 1960; Estate of Rudolph Burckhardt; courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City
Quote, after Elaine de Kooning was returned to New York from her teaching at the University of New Mexico [her studio was full of energetic paintings of bullfights in Juárez, Mexico, and of the expansive western landscape when Burckhardt portrayed her there.]
1972 - 1989

Color