Portrait of Jack Greenbaum 1959

Elaine de Kooning made this energetic portrait of Jack Greenbaum with oil on canvas. Look how she's used these slashes of greens, blues and yellows; it’s all about the gesture, that constant moving of paint around. You can almost feel her energy and rhythm as she's making this piece. It’s all so loose, and there’s a real sense of the materiality of the paint – thick in some places, thin in others. Zoom in on his suit. See how the strokes build up to suggest form, light, and shadow with these layered hues? There's a tension between representation and abstraction going on here. Like, is that a shoulder, or is it just an excuse for a gorgeous smear of blue? This approach has echoes in the earlier work of someone like Alice Neel. Both artists remind us that painting isn’t just about capturing a likeness, but about capturing something of the messy, vital process of seeing itself. It's about embracing the not-knowing, the in-between spaces, and the multiple possibilities of what a painting can be.