?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
HAROLD COUSINS (1916 - 1992) Composition.
Welded steel, mounted on a granite base, 1952-53. Approximately 360x558x315 mm; 14x22x12 1/2 inches. Engraved signature and date on the far left horizontal plate.
Provenance: the artist; Danielle and Marc Cousins, Alexandria, VA; private collection.
Exhibited: Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, January 18 - June 2, 1996; Chicago Cultural Center, June 29 - August 29, 1996; New Orleans Museum of Art, September 14 - November 10, 1996; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, January 12 - March 23, 1997; Milwaukee Art Museum, April 11- June 1, 1997.
Illustrated: Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945 - 1965, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, fig. 23, p. 64.
One of his earliest steel sculptures to come to auction, Harold Cousins's Composition is a remarkable example of mid-century abstraction in sculpture. This abstract composition comes from the artist's first year of working in steel in Paris. In New York, he had studied under William Zorach, Will Barnet and Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, where he also met his wife, Peggy Thomas. The couple moved to Paris in October 1949, where he first studied with Ossip Zadkine, and became close friends with Karel Appel. But it wasn't until he had befriended the Japanese-American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri and learned to weld steel that his work became completely abstract. Composition shows the light and open nature of his subjects in scrap metal before he began the plaitons series in the latter half of the decade. Cousins had his first solo exhibition of these steel works two years later in 1954 at Galerie Creuze in Paris.
