Pierre Alechinsky (*1927)Résumé (1995)

43 Color Lithographs, Title sheet, Edition sheet, signed and numbered 20/100 by the artist. Presented in a Linen / Cardboard box, also decorated by Pierre Alechinsky. All in excellent condition.Price is 1200 EURO / U$1,450 plus applicable tax, shipping and insurance.

Pierre Alechinsky (1927 Belgium)

One of the founders of the CoBrA group, whose dedication to primitive form and often violent strokes of color paralleled the American abstract expressionist movement. The group was formed as a reaction to the formal, refined art popular in other European cities immediately after World War II. The artist's style, anguished during the CoBrA period, softened perceptibly as acceptance for his art grew, but it remains strongly expressionistic. He is particularly adept at achieving subtleties and intensities of color in the lithographic process. The recipient of the Andrew Mellon Prize in 1977, Alechinsky is represented in the collections of sixty-five of the world's leading museums, incl. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. He has also been honored with a permanent room in the Louisiana Museumin Denmark.

The winner of the first Andrew W. Mellon Prize for Painting (1977) and the French Grand Prix National for painting in 1984, Alechinsky has been recognized in recent years as one of the most significant living artists. (The art market has also noticed his stature: one of his paintings sold at auction several years ago for over $2,000,000.)

Alechinsky was just barely out of his teens when he burst onto the art scene as one of the original members of the COBRA group, and over the years he has emerged as one of the most imaginative and witty artists of our times. Alechinsky fans are everywhere. John Russell, who in 1986-87 devoted three separate columns in The New York Times to Alechinsky, sees him as "a man of strange blameless passions. Decorated invoices, worthless stock certificates, obsolete air-force navigational charts and ancient hand-written archival materials spark his imagination. . . . He has a taste for nature’s upheavals." Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist for whom "the garden is the center of the world," has described Alechinsky as a man who "paints gardens. . . . He knows that the history of gardens is the history of all of us. . . . Alechinsky . . . chooses any of the forked paths of the manicured gardens at Blois or Hampton Court and then transforms them, ferociously, into the savage gardens of the primitive mind, the original unity of dream and awareness, reason and imagination, desire and reality." Indeed, it may be that it is his dream of recovering that lost unity that makes him, as The Times called him, "a poet of entanglement, [who] resolutely turns the emphasis away from himself, preferring to act rather as historian and referee than as autobiographer. . . . His touch is light, his thought rapid, his view of the world as sharp as it is benign. There is no better companion, and not many who keep us so consistently amused and are so generous with their findings."

Alechinsky has had major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum in NY, The Museum of Arts, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (in 1977, the Year of the Snake), The Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Musées Royeaux des beaux Arts in Brussels, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Boymans-von-Beuningen in

Rotterdam, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, and museums in Aalborg, Brême, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Des Moines, Düsseldorf, Gordes, Hanover, Marseille, Metz, Mexico City, Munich, St. Paul de Vence, Toronto, and Zurich. Spaightwood Galleries has over 175 images by ALechinsky in inventory; in due time, we will post as many as we can on our web site; if you are looking for a particular images, however, please contact is to determine whether we have an impression available.