De Kooning Draws a Picture

These people don’t know what they’re talking about, but I do! That was the message—the kind that often presages a new critic—from the twenty-nine-year-old painter Elaine de Kooning to Thomas B. Hess, the twenty-seven-year-old managing editor of ART news, in 1948. Founded in 1902, the magazine was primarily devoted to art historical essays and reports on old master acquisitions, while dutifully neglecting new developments in its hometown of New York City. Hess had studied at Yale, specializing in French art history, and was knowledgeable about a lineage of criticism stretching from the salon reviews of Denis Diderot to poet-critics like Charles Baudelaire writing within densely constellated scenes. After two years at ART news, he was starting to feel the electricity emanating from artists’ studios downtown and wanted to hear her out.In 1948 de Kooning was a decade into her relationship with her husband, Willem de Kooning, and at the center of a cyclone of making and talking and looking that engulfed New York artists of the 1930s and 1940s, from Arshile Gorky to Franz Kline. She had studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown and with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. She attende...