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Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
WILLEM DE KOONING Woman with Corset and Long Hair.
Lithograph on Akawara paper, 1970. 805x600 mm; 31 3/4x23 5/8 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 51/61 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Fred Genis at Hollander's Workshop, Inc., New York, with the blind stamp lower right. Published by Knoedler, New York. A superb, dark impression.
Dutch-born Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) arrived in New York in 1926, a stowaway on a cargo ship from Rotterdam, after a somewhat difficult childhood frought with familial and monetary diffculties. Nevertheless, he had gained a solid artistic training in Europe and quickly found work as a commercial artist in New York. By 1942 he had become friends with Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and together these 3 artists would form the nucleus of the New York School of Abstract Expressionsim.
De Kooning worked at Atelier 17, New York, in the early 1940s along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, an experience that led him to create his first etching (see lot 4). He produced his first lithographs--many among the pinnacle of Abstract Expressionist printmaking--while visiting his daughter in San Francisco in 1960. At a party there thrown by his friend and fellow artist William Zogbaum, he learned from the California artist Karl Kasten about the huge lithography press and stones that had recently been installed at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley. The next day, de Kooning went to the UC Berkeley studio and created two monumental lithographs, nearly 4x3 feet, using an ordinary floor mop to brush the tusche (ink) on the stones in broad, sweeping gestures. Woman with Corset and Long Hair fuses these expressive strokes with de Kooning's interest in the female form. Graham 17.
