Merce Cunningham, 1962, painted by Elaine de Kooning

1. You research a subject for years, but there’s always something perfectly obvious that inexplicably eludes you. Today, researching another aspect of the connection between Merce Cunningham and the painter-critic Elaine de Kooning, I chanced upon this 1962 portrait of him by her. It’s in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., a gallery I’ve visited in recent years - I was in Washington D.C. in February 2020 - it’s been on line since at least 2009, but I never knew.

Two things are immediately striking: this is very recognisably Cunningham (those remarkably sloped shoulders, the Nijinsky-like neck, the curly hair, the stance both erect and relaxed) and the poetic resonance of the surrounding colours, suggesting an aura independent of Cunningham’s own colouring and clothes.

Elaine de Kooning married her husband Willem de Kooning in 1943; they were both close friends of the dance critic Edwin Denby, who became friends with Cunningham and John Cage around that time. (Both Elaine and Cunningham were among those who accompanied Denby to dance performances.) When Elaine painted Cunningham, she had known him for almost twenty years as both dancer and person. (She had even performed with him. In summer 1948, she and Willem de Kooning, Cunningham, Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and M.C.Richards all taught and collaborated at Black Mountain College, working together on a production of Erik Satie’s “The Ruse of the Medusa”.)

Cunningham had made an intense impression on the New York dance world in his first ten years in the city, 1939-1949, but then went through another ten years, 1949-1959, that I think of as (a Wagnerian term) his Wanderjahre, his years of wandering, making progress artistically and reaching his physical and artistic prime without commanding much recognition. Only in his early forties (1959-1962), with successive annual seasons of teaching and performance at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, did this heretic begin to make a newly strong impression on many in the modern-dance world. (Even so, the “New York Times” never reviewed his choreography in those years. It seemed to many that the omission was deliberate.) Finally the Cunningham company’s 1964 world tour, commenced after his forty-fifth birthday, put him irreversibly on the world dance map: even the “New York Times” had to pay attention.

Tuesday 23 March