Portrait of Merce Cunningham by Elaine de Kooning

Some found him bewilderingly outrageous. Many others proclaimed him a genius of the first rank. But on one point there is little room for dispute: Merce Cunningham was one of the great influences in the evolution of twentieth-century western dance. He died Sunday July, 26, at age ninety. This 1962 portrait of Cunningham by Elaine de Kooning is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

Joining Martha Graham’s dance company in 1939, Cunningham won his earliest distinction as the originator of major dance roles for a number of Graham’s productions, including Appalachian Spring. In the mid-1940s, he struck out on his own and, in tandem with avant-garde composer John Cage, began developing a dance form—termed aleatoric—that was characterized by an unstructured randomness. After founding his own company in 1953, Cunningham continued to innovate, raising dance to ever more abstract levels.

Today there are few areas of dance—both traditional and avant-garde—that have not been affected by Cunningham’s experimentation. His portraitist, Elaine de Kooning, was most often identified with the abstract expressionist school. But much of her work contained strong figurative elements, endowing her portraits with both the representational vision and the gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism.