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5 WILLEM DE KOONING
Woman with Corset and Long Hair
.
Lithograph on Akawara paper, 1970. 805x600 mm; 31
3
/
4
x23
5
/
8
inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 52/61 in
pencil, lower margin. Printed by Fred Genis, Hollander’s
Workshop, Inc., New York, with the blind stamp lower left.
Published by Knoedler, NewYork. A superb, dark impression.
Dutch born de Kooning (1904-1997) arrived in NewYork, a
stowaway on a cargo ship from Rotterdam, after a difficult
childhood fraught with familial and monetary difficulties.
Nevertheless, he had gained a solid artistic training in Europe
and soon found work as a commercial artist in NewYork. By
1942 he had become friends with Jackson Pollock and Franz
Kline and together these three artists would form the nucleus
of the NewYork School of Abstract Expressionism.
De Kooning worked at Atelier 17 in the early 1940s along with
Pollock and Mark Rothko, an experience that led him to create
his first etching. He produced his first lithographs—among the
most noteworthy Abstract Expressionist prints—while visiting
his daughter in San Francisco in
1960.Ata party there thrown
by his friend and fellow artist William Zogbaum, he learned
from the California artist Karl Kasten about the huge printing
press and lithography stones that had recently been installed at
the University of California, Berkeley.The next day de Kooning
went to the UC Berkeley studio and created two monumental
lithographs, each one nearly 4x3 feet, using an ordinary floor
mop to brush the tusche ink on the stones in broad, entirely
abstract, sweeping gestures.
In its bold, gestural appearance and the contour suggestions of
a woman’s torso and hair,
Woman with Corset and Long Hair
fuses
these expressive strokes with de Kooning’s interest in the female
form. Graham 17.
[6,000/9,000]