Description
A printed text accompanies the print, as issued, and describes it:
“The Last Five Seconds” was drawn directly on stones and personally supervised by Mr. Kingman. It was done in two colors — each on a separate piece of stone — and hand-pressed by George Miller & Son Company in New York.
This original lithograph, commissioned by American Express, has a limited edition of 150 copies, each individually signed by the artist. After this printing, the original (the stones) was destroyed.
Dong M. Kingman was a Chinese-American painter and illustrator. He was educated in Hong Kong at the Lingnan School and at the Fox & Morgan Art School in Oakland, and received two Guggenheim Fellowships. Kingman taught art and Chinese art history at Columbia University and Hunter College in New York from the mid 1940s to mid 1950s. He completed several hotel mural commissions in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and Hong Kong, and also designed the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He served as an art consultant or illustrator on motion pictures, including The World of Suzie Wong, Flower Drum Song, King Rat and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds. Kingman’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the De Young Museum. He was the subject of a posthumous touring retrospective Dong Kingman: An American Master, which was exhibited in the US and China (where the title was changed to Dong Kingman: Watercolor Master) in the early 2000s.
Condition: Generally very good, recently professionally cleaned and deacidified; faint toning line from former matting still slightly visible, can be rematted out. Edition number lower left extremely faint or faded.
References:
“About the Artist.” Dong Kingman. 2000. http://www.dongkingman.org/about.html (12 September 2017).
Hollister, Dean, Amy I. Furman, Mary Bruccoli and Tamara Adams, eds. Who’s Who in American Art. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1989. p. 570.
“The Last Five Seconds, Dong Kingman.” Text accompanying print as issued.