?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ELAINE DE KOONING Portrait of Steven Poleskie.
Pencil on cream wove paper mounted on cardstock, circa 1965. 161x92 mm; 6 1/2x3 3/4 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
De Kooning (1918-1989) worked on a screenprint with Poleskie at Chiron Press, New York, during 1964-65. Poleskie later recalled, "At that time we were close friends and she (de Kooning) was one of the first to work with me in my print shop. I recently found some photographs of her in my studio, Chiron Press. [The photographer] Eddie (Johnson) was also a sculptor and a film maker. We collaborated on a movie called The Bird Film, which was widely shown back then at places like The Bridge Cinema in NYC and the Yale Film Festival . . . Elaine de Kooning was an associate producer, and many of the movie's scenes were shot on her farm at Livingston Manor in upstate New York. Eddie also took the photographs that appeared in Life magazine when Elaine painted her famous, or infamous, portrait of President John F. Kennedy. Elaine's screenprint, was done from her "bulls" series. It was printed in six colors, and Elaine made all the stencils herself, with my help and supervision, using the tusche and glue technique. This process is quite time consuming, and few of the artists I worked with back then were willing to put in the effort required to make a print this way. Elaine and I made a lot of test prints and pulled proofs in many different color combinations. Elaine was a true painter at heart."
Ex-collection Stephen Poleskie, Chiron Press, New York.
