Her parents were Mary Ellen O'Brien, an Irish Catholic, and Charles Frank Fried, a Protestant of Jewish descent.

[9] Her mother, despite being recalled as less loving and attentive than some parents by Elaine's younger sister, supported her eldest's artistic endeavors.

[8] Her mother was committed to the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center for a year during Elaine's childhood after a neighbor reported her for neglect of her children.

After graduating from High School, she briefly studied math at Hunter College in New York City, where she befriended a group of abstract and Social Realist painters.

They painted in his loft at 143 West 21st Street, and he was known for his harsh criticism of her work, "sternly requiring that she draw and redraw a figure or still life and insisting on fine, accurate, clear linear definition supported by precisely modulated shading.

[11] While separated, Elaine remained in New York, struggling with poverty, and Willem moved to Long Island and dealt with depression.

[11] Elaine de Kooning was an accomplished landscape and portrait artist active in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Among this group of artists were Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Rosati, Giorgio Spaventi, Milton Resnick, Pat Passlof, Earl Kerkam, Ludwig Sander, Angelo Ippolito, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann.

After showing their work in their 1951 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Artists: Man and Wife, which also included Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Elaine said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but later I came to think that it was a bit of a put-down of the women.

In 1952 she spent the summer at Art dealer Leo Castelli's house at The Hamptons with Willem de Kooning.

[13] For that reason, she chose to sign her artworks with her initials rather than her full name, to avoid her paintings' being labeled as feminine in a traditionally masculine movement, and to not be confused with her husband Willem de Kooning.

In 2016 de Kooning was one of twelve female artists featured in the "Women of Abstract Expressionism" exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum.

[17] The purpose of this show was to highlight the unique talents and perspectives of female artists who, as was previously noted, were often dismissed or overshadowed by their male counterparts.

"[15] Being the wife of the famous painter Willem de Kooning, she did not receive real recognition for her own achievement until a few years before she died.

Elaine de Kooning made both abstract and figurative paintings and drawings of still life, cityscapes, and portraits.

Her work presents a combination between painting and drawing, surface and contour, stroke and line, color and light, transparency and opacity.

In addition to painting many self-portraits throughout the course of her life, her subjects were often fellow artists—usually men—including poets Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg; writer Donald Barthelme; art critic Harold Rosenberg; Thomas B. Hess, managing editor of Artnews; choreographer Merce Cunningham; legendary art dealer Leo Castelli; innovative jazz musician Ornette Coleman; the famous Brazilian soccer star Pele; and painters Joop Sanders, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and her husband, Willem de Kooning.

In the process, Elaine said she became "hooked" on portraits, through which she melded those aspects she found most intriguing in her subject with elements of herself, according to Mary Gabriel's "Ninth Street Women" (page 138)[12] Elaine employed a wide range of virtuosic drawing and painting techniques: finely detailed pencil drawings and more free ink drawings, crosshatching, erasure, stumping, and improvisational graphic lines, thin paint and impasto, “thin, dripping washes of bold color…” with many media: pencil, ink, charcoal, gouache, collage, mixed media, oil on paper, canvas and masonite.

[24] 'She achieves a sense of distinguishing facial features and captures each subject's presence with sharp, jagged strokes of paint… A drawing of [her brother] Conrad from 1951 presents [his] head and shoulders against a dark background, with a combination of careful lines and darker strokes defining a contemplative figure with great subtlety.”[25] In regard to her portraiture, Elaine de Kooning wrote, "when I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes.

She made connections with students such as William Conger and became friends with artists Joan Oppenheimer, Connie Fox or Margaret Randall.

She particularly admired the sculpture’s twisting, dynamic form, which portrays the commotion created by the drunken god and his equally inebriated attendants.

"[15] In 1985 when Elaine de Kooning visited the cave in the Spanish Pyrenees, she realized that the geological formations and textures of the cave wall were the same as her ground of flying color, drips, washes, and strokes, animal forms and drawing rising out of its contours; giving her the affirmation to her own way of working.

[46] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[47] One of the few residences owned by Elaine de Kooning during her lifetime was a studio at Alewive Brook Road in East Hampton.

The current owners are reportedly developing an artists' residency/alternative exhibition space referred to as "the Elaine de Kooning house.