“When I first met her, I did not recognize her. The truth is, I did not even care for her. It was in Elaine and Willem (Bill) De Kooning’s loft—in 1943 or 1944—on an icy New York winter’s day. I was going to the Art Students League. Bill was about forty, she and I were in our twenties, and I had just come from the first loft I had ever laid eyes on, which I then had no idea I would ever call my own. Coming from Europe, I believed in abstraction. The Art Students League and the few galleries up and down Fifty-Seventh Street showed figuration—pensive and sad or acid and lurid, of men and women in sweatshops, in subways, and on farms, the exploited exhausted by the Depression—or modern French masters. But the first art show I ever saw in my life had been a Paul Klee exhibition in the Buchholz Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, where they also showed the severe, neat Cubism of Juan Gris. I was hungry for more abstraction. ...”
The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 - Edith Schloss
Willem and Elaine de Kooning with a state of Excavation in his Fourth Avenue studio, c. 1949.
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