Lot 78: HAROLD COUSINS (1916 - 1992) Untitled (Abstract Composition).

HAROLD COUSINS (1916 - 1992)
Untitled (Abstract Composition).

Welded steel, painted black, circa 1957-9. Approximately 130x300x130 mm; 5x12x5 inches. With the artist's incised signature on the back.

Provenance: ex-collection the artist; William Lieberman, New York; the current owner.

This abstract steel sculpture comes from a body of work the artist made during his first decade in Paris. In New York, he had studied under William Zorach, Will Barnet and Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, where he also met his wife Peggy Thomas. The couple moved to Paris in October 1949, where he first studied with Ossip Zadkine, and became close friends with Karel Appel. But it wasn't until he had befriended the Japanese-American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri and learned to weld steel with oxygen-acetylene that his work became completely abstract.

The artist assembled metal rod formations in the early 1950s, which he called "forests," free-standing groupings of linear and flattened forms. This series brought him his first critical success in Paris. He then began to add the metal plates or plaitons in 1957. In 1996, many of these early works were included in the Studio Museum in Harlem traveling exhibition Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965. Holman-Conwill pp. 62-63.