This is a rare, striking etching from the early Sixties, in an hors commerce edition of only 10, apart from the regular edition of 50. Belgian painter and graphic artist Pierre Alechinsky was born in Brussels, in 1927. He was one of the founders of the influential COBRA movement, an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, where many of these artists, including Karel Appel & Asger Jorn, originated. This European group, like the abstract expressionists in America. reacted to the formal, controlled approach to art, in favor of the more wildly expressionistic style. However, the word COBRA means, quite literally, a snake, and the serpent is indeed a pervasive theme throughout Alechinsky's oeuvre, laden with symbolic allusions, as is this dramatic piece. In fact, Spaightwood Galleries, which held a retrospective of Alechinsky's prints, claims Alechinsky's major career successes occured in every Chinese "Year of the Snake": In 1977 Alechinsky was awarded the Mellon Prize for painting by the prestigious Carnegie Institute, and in 1989 he was awarded a major traveling Guggenheim retrospective. Alechinsky is represented in the collections of at least sixty- five of the world's leading museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has also been honored with a permanent room in the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Most recently, the government of Belgium printed a postage stamp based upon one of Alechinsky's designs. "Ca Serpente" offered here has excellent provenance, as it came from the J.L. Hudson Gallery, founded in 1963 by Joseph L. Hudson, the president of the Detroit based J. L. Hudson Company, who is credited with bringing the highest caliber modernist art to the Detroit areas. The legendary Albert Landry, who had previously owned a gallery in New York, was hired as its first director. The measuresments above are for the piece FRAMED. Unframed, the etching measures 24 x 18.5 inches.