Description
Wessel Couzijn (Amsterdam, 1912 – Haarlem, 1984) lived in the United States from 1915, where he took his first drawing lessons at the Art Students League. In 1929 he moved back to the Netherlands. The following year he started the painting course at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He was taught by, among others, professor Jan Bronner, a respected traditional sculptor. Couzijn re-enrolled in the sculpture department. In 1936 he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to visit Italy for a study trip. Around 1939 he stayed temporarily in Paris, where he met the sculptor Aristide Maillol and became acquainted with the work of Auguste Rodin. His Jewish background forced Couzijn to flee Europe in 1940. He spent the war years in New York and met many other European artists who suffered the same fate, such as Ossip Zadkine and Jacques Lipchitz. Here he also met the sculptress Pearl Perlmutter, whom he married. After the war, Wessel Couzijn returned to Amsterdam. There he adopted a personal, very moving expressionist style. Initially he worked figuratively, but gradually his sculptures – partly due to the impressions he gained during a visit to Auschwitz – became non-figurative expressions of emotional concepts such as hope, despair, love, liberation and oppression: monumental plastic made way for more open forms, in which space and dynamics strengthen the expression. Until 1970, Couzijn lived and worked in Amsterdam, then in Amstelveen. He built up a valued and impressive oeuvre and won several art prizes, including the David Röell Prize for his entire oeuvre in 1966 and the Dutch State Prize for Sculpture in 1967. His work was shown at the Venice and Middelheim Biennales and is in many private and public collections.
Couzijn is well-known for his scultures, but also his etchings are highly appreciated and sought after. This etching is in his expressionist style of the 1960s, when also his wife Pearl Perlmutter experimented in experimental graphic art. In very good condtion, signed artists proof and Couzijn, not framed, sheet 59×52, etching 34×31.
