Oil on canvas, signed at lower right, titled at lower left, float mounted in a silvered frame.

Stretcher size 24 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. Frame dimensions 25 1/4 x 21 1/4 in.

Private Collection, Brooklyn, New York

Chicago-born artist Emerson Woelffer was a pioneering Abstract Expressionist. From 1935 to 1938, Woelffer studied at the Art Institute of Chicago while employed as a janitor. He joined the Works Progress Administration arts program in 1938 as an easel painter and subsequently worked as a topographical draftsman for the United States Air Force. The director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, László Moholy-Nagy, invited Woelffer to join the faculty in 1942. He exhibited in group shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, participated in the Whitney Museum Annual (1949), and won the Pauline Palmer Prize for painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1948).

By 1950, he began working at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. He traveled to Europe for an artist residency between 1957 and 1959. In 1959 he returned and joined the faculty at Chouinard Art Institute (later the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles, where he taught emerging artists like Ed Ruscha. In 1974, Woelffer was named chair of the art department at the Otis Art Institute and remained there until his retirement. Woelffer was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1967, and the Guggenheim’s Francis J. Greenburger Award in 1988. Woelffer’s work is represented in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Scattered areas of retouching visible under UV light inspection, some surface grime and few scuffs along edges with associated fleabite losses, minor frame wear