?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
EMERSON WOELFFER Untitled.
Color lithograph, 1954. 565x470; 22 1/4x18 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 52/150 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression with strong colors.
Despite working distantly from the New York scene during much of his formative career years (and later), Emerson Woelffer (1914-2003) nevertheless retained rather strong ties to the Abstract Expressionists. Like many of the New York School painters, his style was influenced by contemporary jazz music. In the 1940s, Woelffer helped to decorate Ruth Reinhart's Chicago night club Jazz Unlimited and two well-known jazz musicians, Danny Alvin and Doc Evans, got the artist intersted in collecting ethnographic sculpture from Africa and New Guinea. During a 1949 summer teaching stint at Black Mountain College, Woelffer became friends with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, who were his colleagues at the avant-garde art school. In 1950, he became director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, which led to a close, life-long friendship with Robert Motherwell following the latter's artist-in-residence in 1954. Woelffer moved to Los Angeles in 1959 to join the faculty of the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) and there influenced numerous later generations in Abstract Exressionism.
