Lot 63205 | ELAINE DE KOONING (American, 1919-1989) Portrait
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ELAINE DE KOONING (American, 1919-1989) Portrait of John F. Kennedy, 1963 Oil on canvas 96 x 48 inches (243.8 x 121.9 cm) Initialed lower right: E de K PROVENANCE: Estate of the artist; Conrad Fried, New York; Private collection, New York. Elaine de Kooning, student and later wife of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), was an accomplished painter, teacher, and critic in her own right. Although her abstract series and her bull and cave paintings were widely exhibited during her lifetime, portraiture remained a continual source of inspiration. Her sitters were close friends and today serve as a yearbook of the postwar school of poets, artists, musicians, dancers, and composers active in New York during the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike her female predecessors, Elaine preferred to paint men. In open admiration of masculinity, Elaine's sitters included artists Jim Bohery and Aristodimos Kaldis, composer Merce Cunningham, and art dealer Leo Castelli. In late 1962, Elaine spent two weeks in the Winter White House in Palm Beach, Florida, to paint John F. Kennedy. Elaine was the only artist to sketch the president from life. Intending to make a single portrait, Elaine was fascinated by the changeability of Kennedy's features, resulting in hundreds of sketches and some two dozen canvases. When the president was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Elaine was so distraught that she ceased to paint for nearly a year. She even declined an offer to reproduce the portrait she had made of him on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, explaining that she never wanted to profit from that or any other portrait. Today, one of the finished canvases hangs in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and another in the John F. Kennedy Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The loose and furious brushstrokes of this portrait of John F. Kennedy are consistent with Abstract Expressionist paintings of the period. Elaine, like her contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, combines figurative and abstract elements within the same composition.
