Elaine de Kooning, 68; Noted Artist, Commentator, Professor

Elaine de Kooning, an artist whose works ranged from realism to abstraction for more than 30 years, died Wednesday of lung cancer. She was 68.

She entered Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia in November and she was diagnosed as having cancer. She had been hospitalized in New York the last two weeks and died early Wednesday.

“I always say I’m an escape artist,” she told art critic Rose Slivka when asked to describe her style. “Style is something I’ve always tried to avoid. I’m more interested in character.”

Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and are featured in other institutions throughout the country.

She was married to Willem de Kooning, a renowned abstractionist, for 45 years. Asked by a Times art writer in 1984 how she reconciled their careers, she said she never believed she operated in his shadow.

“I was working in his light ,” she said emphatically.

Over the years she established herself both in and out of her studio, as art commentator and as a professor at the University of New Mexico, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.

She was born Elaine Catherine Fried in 1920. She attended Hunter College, then switched to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in Manhattan, where she found friends active in the abstract and realism movement.

She met De Kooning about that time, and they were married Dec. 9, 1943, about five years after she had become his private student.

Her first solo exhibition was in 1952 at the Stable Gallery in New York. Her most recent work was inspired by Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain.

When she was taken with a theme, as she was with the caves, or with the first bullfight she saw three decades ago, she drew series of watercolor sketches before immersing herself in a single picture.

She also was considered a talented portraitist and was commissioned to do two portraits of John F. Kennedy. One hangs in the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., the other in the Kennedy Library in Cambridge, Mass.