The Preacher 1971
| Medium: | Stone lithograph on J Whatman creme-toned paper, with full margins |
| Sheet size: | 30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm) |
| Image size: | 25.25 x 19 (64.1 x 48.3 cm) |
| Printer: | Fred Genis, Hollander Workshop, New York |
| Publisher: | Knoedler, Inc,, New York |
| Edition: | 60 with 22 artist's proofs |
| Edition Number: | AP IV/XXII |
| Signed: | In pencil lower right "de Kooning '71" |
| Catalogue Raisonné: | Graham 27 |
$18,000
Amityville 1971
Oil on canvas
Tumultuously painted on stone, this lithograph records de Kooning's
headlong rush into the materiality of his image.
Irwin Hollander, the first printer to graduate from Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles, and his Dutch partner Fred Genis opened a workshop in New York.
De Kooning started working with them in 1970. They editioned twenty-four images by him, of which The Preacher is one of the most densely painted.
De Kooning and Jackson Pollock were the two greatest figures of Abstract Expressionism. De Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 1926 he stowed aboard a ship to the United States planning to support himself as a commercial artist. In New York in 1927 he met John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and other important avant-garde artists.
In 1953 at the Sidney Janis Gallery he exhibited an aggressive group of slathered paintings of leering women manhandled with slashing brushstrokes and slicing lines. The notoriety de Kooning obtained from his visceral paint rhetoric brought him towering fame.
During the 1950s and 1960s he exerted prodigious effects on generations of artist. William Seitz's characterization
that at Abstract Expressionism's core was "a plastic figure coiled in space" had de Kooning in mind. Erupting from Freud and Surrealism, De Kooning's writhing paint called up primitive, visceral gods.