Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine de Kooning

He was devastating, an enigmatic rebel already producing the violent, tortured canvases that would earn him acclaim as the "Great Master" of post-war America. She was mesmerizing, a sensuous, provocative young painter with an all-consuming appetite for art and for life. Each was ambitious; neither was psychologically constituted to be an also-ran or to play it safe. They came together in an irresistible collision of passion and power that almost destroyed them both and irrevocably changed the face of modern American art. Over a fifty-year on-again, off-again "open" marriage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning lived and worked at the epicenter of the art world, setting trends and style, inciting gossip and intrigue, and eventually amassing power and fame and fortune. Their friends and foes were the giants of postwar American art; their arena was the volatile cauldron of Abstract Expressionism, in which macho posturing, drunken display, and sexual promiscuity were considered the bona fides of artistic potency. The cultural firestorm they helped to ignite continues to smolder today. Here for the first time is the unvarnished inside story of these larger-than-life personalities and the ever-shifting balance of power between them; of Machiavellian gamesmanship disguised as high cultural discourse; and the ongoing speculation as to the authenticity of de Kooning's late work. Explosive in its implications for the art world and fascinating as an exploration of the meaning of marriage and commitment, Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage is an unforgettable true tale of love, sex, obsession, and artistic genius.