SUBSTACK: Elaine de Kooning Paints a Picture
The selected writings of a cherished Abstract Expressionist painter made a firm mark on the history of art.
01.24.25 for Absolument !, my Substack channel
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What a tremendously talented writer Elaine was! She was perceptive and astute; sensitive and truthful; and deep in the trenches of the movement as a founding Abstract Expressionist artist herself. She read the art movement’s pulses and picked out the glaring talent, buffing up the artists and their works so that they were gleaming during her public exposure of them.
Here are some of her writing excerpts, which will give you a perfect idea of how these artists existed and the ways they turned the verb painting into a noun: a painting. Into paintings for all of us to still enjoy—or not!
About herself, and the influence of historic cave paintings on an era of her work:
“Prehistoric art was secret—hidden way deep as though they didn’t want you to find it. The first two caves we visited—Niaux and Bedheilac—were vast cathedral spaces and we had to walk, it seemed for miles, before we arrived at the first images. The cave walls with their splotches of red and ochre or gleaming white calcium deposites, their rolling turbulent forms and intricate cracks and crevices seemed to be teeming with animals before I saw my first actual prehistoric drawing. When I did see it, a crude and powerful bison, I was overwhelmed by its unexpected immediacy. . .
I felt a tremendous identification with those Paleolithic artists. I found myself deep in the caves imagining that I was one of them, looking for surfaces smooth enough to paint on, noticing chunk of yellow clay on the ground that would be perfect to draw with. How alive their animals must have looked to them in the flickering dim light of their torches. And I loved their high-handed way with scale, juxtaposing huge and tiny creatures, with fragmented images—and always, always in profile.”