From a piece in This Recording by Elaine de Kooning:
He’s one of those people that once I knew him, I seem to have known him always. I would meet Rothko at parties. Jeanne Reynal gave the most superb parties. She’d have perhaps 18 people and have drinks before dinner-wonderful, luxurious drinks-and wine with dinner and drinks after dinner. And the walls were covered with Gorkys and then she had a superb painting by Mark Rothko. And later she bought some paintings of Bill’s. So I would meet him often at Jeanne Reynal’s and also at the Artists Club, and at parties of Yvonne Thomas’s.
Often at these parties at Yvonne Thomas’, the discussion would not be about art. It would be about the comparative merits of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Yvonne Thomas had a huge apartment up on Park Avenue and she also gave wonderful parties. So it was a great period for parties. Really scintillating, sparkling parties when the conversation was just absolutely wonderful. And Mark Rothko was very social, very smooth socially. He had kind of an aloof manner. He would stand up very straight with his head tilted back looking down and with a little archaic Greek smile on his face and make these dry little wisecracks. And I found him very witty and also a very attractive man. He had an atmosphere of sensuality that I found very appealing. So I would say I met him in 1950.
His earlier work in the ’40s that was influenced by André Masson and had those contours and had a tension to his work. But then when he came out with the first paintings of the floated on areas, the turpentine washes where there were no contours and the edges were indistinct, one color floated over another.
I was absolutely captured by the magic of the presence of the colors, the fact that they did not inhabit shapes. That interested me very much. The shapes, they weren’t really shapes. They inhabited areas and the areas were approximate. It was, to me, very enthralling. So I wrote Rothko a letter explaining my response to his work, and he told me that he was very touched by the letter, that it meant a great deal to him, that it was the most intelligent sense of a response that he had received to his paintings because, of course, they had been covered by critics. So from the day of that letter forth, we were fast friends. He was always very flirtatious with me. And his relation to certain women was one of you know, the kind of flirtation that’s not intended to lead anywhere, but up in the air is that sense of, wouldn’t it have been wonderful?