Elaine de Kooning (1920-1989)
March 12- Happy birthday to Elaine de Kooning who was a Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter.

Elaine DeKooning was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York and spent her childhood studying the lives of artists and visiting the museums and galleries of New York City.

After high school she attended the American Artists School and the Leonardo da Vinci School and was swept up in the cultural excitement in New York of the late 1930s and early 1940s.  In 1943 she married Willem de Kooning, one of the group of artists soon to emerge as the first generation of Abstract Expressionists.  He was sixteen years older than she.

To the public she was known as the wife of Willem de Kooning, who has lived in East Hampton since 1961. To colleagues and those whose lives she affected, however, Ms. de Kooning was a gifted painter.

Elaine is credited as the significant influence on making Willem de Kooning the leading name in New York art circles because of her well-placed flirtations, skillful writing of reviews in art magazines, and ability to speak forcefully in private and public lectures.

As a married couple they had strong emotional ties, and yet each had numerous sexual relationships with other persons. They separated in the 1960s but reconciled in the 1970.

One of her most famous commissions was for President John F. Kennedy, which was in process at the time of the assassination. She worked on hundreds of sketches and some two dozen finished canvases in her attempt to capture the President’s restless energy.

When he died, she was so saddened that she put down her brushes for a year.

Her personal life was tumultuous, largely due to her alcoholism, and the wild, heady times of riding the crest of Abstract Expressionism.  She was a chain smoker, which caused her death at the age of 68 on February 1, 1989 of lung cancer in New York.

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Rosa Bonheur (1822 – 1899)

Happy Birthday to Rosa born on March 16, 1822.

She was one of four children, each trained as an artist. Most influential in her life, both artistically and socially, was her father, Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, also a trained artist.

As was traditional in the art schools of the period, Bonheur began her artistic training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching from plaster models. As her training progressed she began to make studies of domesticated animals from life, to include horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits and other animals in the pastures on the perimeter of Paris. When Rosa Bonheur began her career as a professional artist, she had already been trained by her father who had allowed her to study in all male classes. Rosa also learned by sketching masterworks at the Louvre from the age of fourteen.

As a French Realist she established herself as the foremost “animalier,” or animal painter, linked with landscape painting and the Realist tradition of the time.

Her fascination with, and meticulous rendering of animals fit in perfectly with Realism and popular trends in nature studies. Rosa was a hit with the public, and exhibited yearly at the Salon beginning in 1841. Her sales were brisk due partly to the fact that everyone had heard of her: she earned a living as an artist, won awards, smoked in public, wore overalls (she needed a special license to do so) and visited slaughterhouses to study animal anatomy. In short, she was a notorious woman.

After her 1853 masterpiece The Horse Fair became world famous, two interesting things happened. Rosa began receiving honors, including the Légion d’honneur (from the Empress Eugénie, in 1865), previously only held by men and retreated from the limelight.

She bought an estate near the Forest of Fontainebleau and settled there with her life-long companion, Nathalie Micas (and, after Micas’ death, American painter Anna Klumpke), and her menagerie of animals. She died at the age of 77.

Today she is also revered for being an outspoken feminist, and gaining female visual artists more equal status. Her nonconformity was outrageous for 19th-century Paris but, because she was so successful and independently wealthy, she forced many to reconsider the “role” of women artists.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Bonheur

Famous Work:
Bonheur began work on The Horse Fair in 1852. For a year and a half, she made sketches twice a week at the horse market in Paris, on the boulevard de l’Hôpital, dressing as a man in order to attract less attention from the horse dealers and buyers. The picture shows with accuracy the trees lining the boulevard and the cupola of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière nearby.

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