Autumn/Winter 2022

stand back, you can see it’s a monumental multifigured
portrait, but if you take any 50 square
centimetres of the canvas, eliminating the heads
and feet, all you will see is pure abstraction.A
friend of Elaine de Kooning’s taught an art class
at a drug rehabilitation centre on an island east
of the Bronx, which is where de Kooning found
these ‘sitters’. She wanted to create major political
picture to draw attention to the terrible plight of
drug addiction in New York in the 1960s – this
was painted in 1963 – and it was the perfect year
to paint a picture that would make a political
splurge, because it was also the year she was
painting the US president, JFK.
PORTRAIT GESTURES
In 1962, Elaine de Kooning was given a commission
by the Truman Library in Missouri and she spent
nearly all of 1963 painting pictures of JFK. He was
assassinated in November 1963, and because she
was so focused on this commission, she went
through a long period of mourning, and didn’t
paint much in 1964, until she finally delivered
the commission to the Truman library in 1965 –
almost 3 years after the original commission. She
did a hundred or so sketches of JFK, and over 20
paintings of all different sizes. This is the second
or third largest one, in a wonderful pose, legs
open casually, yet he was the president!
Another telling portrait by Elaine is her
depiction of Willem (Bill) de Kooning, from 1952.
In the mid-1940s she starts painting oil portraits,
using quite a dark palate; the faces are largely
wiped, with almost no features to the face.
Regarding this one, she once wrote, ‘As soon
as I wiped off his face, it was more Bill’. Theirs
was a turbulent open marriage, but there was
a sweetness and connection that remained
between them. The reason she didn’t paint face
details is that she always said you learned more
about a person from their posture, the way they
carry themselves. She wanted to bring that idea
76 Restoration Conversations • Autumn / Winter 2022