NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s has been entrusted by the Lisa de Kooning Trust with the sale of Willem de Kooning’s acclaimed Clamdigger, ranked as the most important sculpture of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and one of de Kooning ‘s greatest works in any medium. Having remained as part of de Kooning’s personal collection since it was created in 1972, Clamdigger is widely recognized alongside Giacometti’s Walking Man as a crowning achievement in expressive 20th century sculpture, in which de Kooning pushed the boundaries of what was possible in sculpture and launched a creative Renaissance of his art in the 1970s. A rare male subject for an artist famous for his highly expressionistic depiction of monumental women, de Kooning kept this work for himself; several art historians assert it became a surrogate self-portrait, depicting with the most brutal honesty an artist in his sixties conscious of humanity and his mortality. De Kooning would confront his Clamdigger every day, positioning it with pride of place by the entrance to his studio.

The majority of the ten casts belong to major institutions and foundations around the world, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Glenstone Foundation in Potomac, Maryland, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Daros Foundation in Switzerland and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. Clamdigger was also a highlight of the highly celebrated De Kooning: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2011. The MoMA exhibition curator, John Elderfield, stated: “Of his generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, de Kooning is the only one, besides Barnett Newman, to have sustained an interest in sculpture-making for a substantial amount of time; he is also the only one to have embraced the traditional medium of bronze casting and the human figure as a subject.”

“’Clamdigger’ is one of our grandfather’s greatest achievements, and it also had a very personal connection for him and for our whole family. Nonetheless, we have decided to offer this very special work at auction in order to fulfill the tax obligations of our mother’s estate. We certainly hope it will find a new home as wonderful as the de Kooning studio where it guarded the entryway for so many years,” declared the three grand-daughters of the artist.

“This is truly an unprecedented opportunity for the many collectors who recognize de Kooning’s ‘Clamdigger’ as a milestone in modern sculpture and one of the most important works of Abstract Expressionism,” said Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art. “De Kooning was one of a select group of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas who have made the transition from painting to produce master works in three dimensions, and this sculpture shows de Kooning’s genius to cross the boundaries of medium and to find total freedom in his new expression. With its extraordinarily gnarled surface and ruthless honesty, this is the definition of an artist in his sixties confronting, through the making of this male figure, what it is to be human in the most primal form and wanting to explore his own mortality.”

Willem de Kooning’s Clamdigger is one of the most remarkable works of art to have been produced in the last fifty years and in many ways stands as a highly personal invocation of the spirit of its creator. Having remained in the artist’s personal collection since its inception, the close bond between de Kooning and this particular work is almost palpable. For the last four decades Clamdigger stood as a familiar and protective guard at the entrance to de Kooning’s studio in East Hampton—a place he moved to in the early 1960s to escape the distractions of Manhattan. The east end of Long Island became a haven for the artist, a place where he had the space and freedom to reflect on a life lived, and the life still to come. Here, Clamdigger became de Kooning’s Adam, an object created in his own image and every day, as he entered the studio, the artist would see this sculpture. Looking into its noble face, he could confront himself, exposed in a raw state, and reflect on not only his own mortality, but also on the countless possibilities still to come.

Laden down with heavy oversized feet, the upright figure is anchored directly to the ground from which it has emerged. The small head evokes Neanderthal man, complete with sunken eyes, a crumpled nose and pursed lips. The head appears to be fused directly to the body, giving the impression of a hunched figure struggling to free itself from its earthly shackles. De Kooning places heavy emphasis on the bodily appendages that he attaches to his figure’s solid torso. The figure’s left arm snakes around itself and ends in a large flat protrusion that is part hand/part tool, like the ones the clam diggers used to extricate their prey from the mud. The right hand holds an extra arm in place of a clam digger’s rake, carried club-like as if going into battle.

In the same way as in his paintings, de Kooning’s sculptures were the result of a visceral creative process which tapped into the same instinctual—almost primitive—expressionistic forces that produced some of the artist’s greatest works. To exacerbate this, the artist often modeled his figures with his eyes closed, enabling him to feel the potency, energy and movement of his materials directly through his fingers. This technique allowed him to develop a direct, intuitive relationship with his work, almost as if he was working on an extension of his own body.

The unique surface texture of Clamdigger was only possible by working with extremely wet clay. Initially de Kooning had reservations about working with such a material as clay, but those soon evaporated when he saw what he was able to achieve. “In some ways, clay is even better than oil,” de Kooning told Crafts Horizon magazine in 1972. “You can work and work on a painting but you can’t start over again with the canvas like it was before you put that first stroke down. And sometimes, in the end, it’s not good, no matter what you do. But with clay, I cover it with a wet cloth and come back to it the next morning and if I don’t like what I did, or I changed my mind, I can break it down and start over. It’s always fresh.” This process of change was constant. In the case of Clamdigger, de Kooning had originally envisioned the sculpture to stand seven or eight feet high, but over the course of several revisions, he finally settled on the current proportions, which are of human size and remain the only scale produced.

Clamdigger is the first work in the artist’s series of large-scale sculpture. Produced in his studio in East Hampton, de Kooning instructed his studio assistant to construct a complex armature out of wood and metal supports upon which the artist would begin to build the gnarled figure. Using layer-upon-layer of very wet, malleable clay de Kooning would create the form—moving, kneading and twisting the material as required–until he produced the desired effect. De Kooning worked in the round, placing Clamdigger on a movable wooden base so that he could inspect the figure from a variety of angles. De Kooning’s method of using very wet clay bore strong similarities to his practice of using oil paint, allowing him to imbue his sculptures with the same degree of expressionistic vigor as his paintings and drawings.

The clamdigger motif is one of de Kooning’s most enduring subjects and was inspired by the men and women he witnessed digging for clams on the beaches near his East Hampton home. Before executing the present work, de Kooning had used the motif in a number of paintings and lithographs, including most notably in 1963 with a painting called Clam Diggers. This was the first major woman painting of the 1960s and features two voluptuously rendered female figures. Although he worked almost exclusively with the female form, Clamdigger is clearly male, and it is for this reason that this work has been regarded as being a self-portrait of the artist.