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La honte signed 'Alechinsky' (lower right); signed, titled and dated 'Alechinsky 1963 La Honte' (on the stretcher) oil on canvas 51 x 51in. (131 x 131cm.) Painted in 1963 PROVENANCE Galerie de France, Paris Acquired from the above by Dr. and Mrs Benjamin Kresberg, Miami in the 1960s. NOTES The authenticity has kindly been confirmed by the artist. In 1959 Alechinsky participated in the exhibition Vitalit… dell'arte in Venice, where he met for the first time Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, Bram van Velde and Willem de Kooning. This was followed by a visit to New York in 1961. By 1963, Alechinsky had developed a highly painterly style which was reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionism of De Kooning. The free gestural brush strokes in La Honte reflect many of these influences and combine them into a hallucionatory vision that automatically materialises into the phantoms of the artist's unconscious. The four figures in La Honte appear out of the heavily worked surface of the painting as if they were spectres from the recesses of Alechinsky's haunted imagination. Alechinsky achieves this by employing the unconscious automatic techniques of the surrealists from which he had hitherto shied away. As he once said 'Surrealism is one of the principal sources of Cobra, but one from which Cobra turns aside.' However, encouraged by Dotremont he was visited by Andr‚ Breton in 1963 who wrote to him first saying 'That which I savour most in art is that which you command, that power to entwine curves, that clearly organic rhythm, that happy feminine submission which you obtain from colours, from light. (Exh. Cat., Pierre Alechinsky, Writings and Paintings, Museum of Art Carnegie Instiute, Paris 1987, p. 209). SALESROOM NOTICE Please note that the present work is sold with a photo-certificate by the artist, dated May 19 2001.
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