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Tag: portraits

Elaine de Kooning: Portraits in the Art and Artist Files

Announcement for Elaine de Kooning's exhibition of portraits at Washburn Gallery, 1994-- AAPG
Announcement for Elaine de Kooning’s exhibition of portraits at Washburn Gallery, 1994– AAPG

The National Portrait Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Elaine de Kooning in the show Elaine de Kooning: Portraits, organized by Brandon Brame Fortune, the Portrait Gallery’s chief curator and senior curator of painting and sculpture. Elaine was an active member of the Abstract Expressionists in New York, a group known for a style defined by vivid colors, spontaneity and emotive strokes of thick, layered paint on monumental canvases. She married fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning in 1943. However, Elaine’s work was not solely abstract, in fact, the majority of her work is representational in nature—a style that could be categorized as Figurative Expressionism.

Charles Loring Elliott carte-de-visite – AA/PG Library

Charles Loring Elliott portrait photograph
Charles Loring Elliott carte-de-visite

Charles Loring Elliott (born Scipio, NY, 1812; died Albany, NY, 1868)

At the time of his death, Charles Loring Elliott was one of the most well-known American portrait painters of the mid-19th century. The artist vertical file at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery (AAPG) Library contains several contemporaneous multi-page eulogies and/or reminiscences on Elliott’s life and career. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman claimed that Elliott had painted almost 700 portraits – a truly prolific life’s work if indeed true.