Willem de Kooning
Litho #1 (Waves #1), 1960 Lithograph Sheet size: 45 15/18 x 31 15/18 inches Edition of 8 Signed and dated in pencil
In 1960 during a visit to the University of California at Berkeley, Willem de Kooning, in completely unpremeditated circumstances, made two huge and innovative lithographs. He had never made a lithograph prior to this. The artist was left alone with two lithographic stones, each nearly four feet high and in less than an hour, de Kooning created two images, this and another called Waves 2. They embody not just the artist’s forceful gestures of that afternoon, but also the immediacy and spontaneity that epitomize Abstract Expressionism. Each lithograph was printed in fewer than ten impressions and are represented in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.