A founding member of The Club in New York’s Greenwich Village, Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School who maintained a distinctive balance of close observation and gestural spontaneity in her practice. For over forty years, de Kooning developed a unique body of work and reputation for her quick working method. Respected as a portrait painter, she earned a major commission to paint then-President John F. Kennedy. Beyond the realm of portraiture, her best-known subjects include bulls and bison, Bacchus, cave paintings and more.

De Kooning frequently drew inspiration from places she traveled. At the end of the 1950s, she arrived at a new working scale and a fresh sensitivity to color while on a teaching assignment in New Mexico. She began traveling to Europe in the 1970s, where the landmarks of Paris and the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, offered new inspiration.

Complementing her work as a painter, de Kooning is regarded at the intellectual center of Abstract Expressionism. Following a formative sumer at Black Mountain College in 1948, where her husband Willem de Kooning was invited to teach, de Kooning began contributing to the influential magazine Art News. Over the next forty years her writing on artists including Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and others would shape the legacy of post-war art.

Solo exhibitions of de Kooning’s work have been staged at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2015–2016), Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia (1992), Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York (1989), Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey (1973). Her work has recently been featured in major survey exhibitions organized by the Denver Art Museum (2016), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2023), and American Federation of Arts (2025–2027). De Kooning’s work is collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and other museums.