In his personal memoirs, there is a passage in which Zao Wou-ki looks back on how he acquired his house in the Rue Jonquoy in Paris, a place that frequently appears in the photographs inserted in several of his big picture albums, showing past scenes and impressions from his studio or the yard. Zao and his wife, May, moved into the little house in 1961, after it had been renovated according to the painter's own meticulous blueprints, and they were both very happy with the design and layout of the house. Zao recalls how he had made the entire second floor into an atelier, with a small garden outside and a little fishpond with some goldfish in it. He never opened the studio's windows on to the street, and the entire interior of the house was shaded off from the outside world by a large concrete wall, ensuring that noone could look inside. So the atelier was like a well-concealed little "box", into which daylight fell only from the north, creating a stable, grayish kind of lighting that formed the backdrop for Zao's work. It allowed him a firm grasp of his colors' intensity without having to worry that the quality of their most subtle shades and nuances might be distorted by the irregular play of sunlight.

When painting in his new studio, Zao felt completely at ease. He would shut himself in his second-floor atelier and refuse to see anybody, sometimes including even close family members. It was here that he created countless of his must most delicately hued pieces, and the place remains his studio and living room to this very day. Its spaciousness also allowed him to work in large formats, something he was encouraged to do by Sam Kootz.

"In my new atelier I could work in large formats: there was enough space to take several steps back from the painting, or to move it around the room a bit, or to adjust the easel as required. I discovered the pleasures of big, sweeping strokes, their verve and beauty. Kootz was very fond of big paintings, and encouraged me a lot to work in big formats, which was very unusual for an art dealer. After all, large paintings are both difficult to put on show and difficult to...sell! I experienced intense physical joy from painting in large brushstrokes on large surfaces, and I reached a point where I virtually didn't want to paint anything but large format pictures. Kootz was a big fellow who originally came from Virginia in the United States. He spoke with a heavy southern drawl and had once been a lawyer, but he was also a true connoisseur of art, and quite an expert on painting. It has to be said, though, that apart from Picasso and Dubuffet, he was only interested in abstract painting. In 1947, he opened his first gallery in New York, which he later closed down for a while before reopening it between 1955 and 1956. His inaugural exhibition featured works by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), William de Kooning (1904-1977), Barnett Newman (1905-1970), and Franz Kline (1910-1962). At the time, all of them were still young painters at the beginning of their careers, and Sam was like a father to them. He was extremely generous with his time and money, and would often take us young folks to restaurants or concerts. Through him, we made the acquaintance of numerous American artists, as well as museum directors and curators. One of them was James Sweeney, the great Mondrian collector."

"Ce nouvel atelier me permettait enfin de peindre des grands formats. Il m'offrait de l'espace pour avoir du recul et déplacer les tableaux. Je pouvais à ma guise avancer et reculer le chevalet sans trébucher. Je découvrais l'amplitude des gestes. Sam Kootz aimait les grands tableaux et m'y encouragea, ce qui est peu commun pour un marchand, car difficile à exposer, et... à vendre ! J'éprouvais une grande joe phsique à tartiner de très grandes surfaces, au point d'en devenir obsédé et de ne faire plus que cela! De taille immense, avec un fort accent du sud, Sam Kootz était avocat. Originaire du Virginie, grand amateur de peinture, il ne s'intéressait qu'à l'abstraction, en dehors de Picasso et de Dubuffet. Il eut une première galerie a New York, en 1947, fermée puis réouverte en 1955-1956, où il exposa pour la première fois Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, De Kooning, Newman, Kline. Ils étaient tous bien sûr de jeune peintres et permettaient à Sam de jouer le rôle d'un pere. Sam était d'une grande générosité, il nous consacrait son temps en nous emmenant au restaurant ou au concerte. Grâce à lui j'ai recontré beaucoup d'artiste américains ou de conservateurs de musées comme James Sweeney, grand collectionneur de Mondrian." (Zao Wou-ki & Françoise Marquet, Autoportrait, Fayard, Paris, 1986, pp. 136-137)

In the 1950s, Sam Kootz (1899-1982), the accomplished art dealer and collector who Zao Wou-ki remembers so fondly in his autobiography, became a sponsor of a number of first-rate abstract expressionist artists, including Motherwell, Hans Hofman (1880-1966), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), Rothko, and de Kooning. His importance for the movement was such that in 1966 Time Magazine described the Sam Kootz Gallery as the "headquarters of the abstract-expressionist school". Before that, Kootz had already been Picasso's number one agent for the US market, and generally was very well connected. From the beginning, he was deeply impressed with France-based Zao Wou-ki's art, and he organized as many as four solo exhibitions of his work in 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1964, respectively. In addition, Kootz featured Zao's works in a total of five joint exhibitions in the years 1958, 1959, 1962, 1963 and 1965. Kootz not only helped Zao to make a name for himself on the Amercian art market, he was also the one who kept encouraging the Chinese-French painter to try his hand at large formats. If it hadn't been for this farsighted art dealer from Virginia, the richly expressive, free-flowing compositions on large canvas that Zao began to paint from the 1960s onwards might never have come into existence. Thanks to Kootz's discerning eye and tireless promotion, Zao's paintings soon found their way into the collections of many museums, galleries and private collectors in the United States. The legendary Kootz Gallery was closed permanently in 1966 due to the death of Mrs. Kootz, after which her husband devoted his energies to writing, putting to paper his many observations and experiences in the world of art. The obituary in Time Magazine on August 23, 1982, praised Kootz's achievements and called him a "foresighted art dealer and paladin of abstract expressionism in America".

This lot, Zao Wou-ki's "19.7.63", was also once on sale in the Kootz Gallery when the art dealer's professionalism and discriminating eye were already widely known. Unlike most other gallery owners, Kootz encouraged the young Zao to follow his inspiration and paint whatever he liked, without regard for size or format. This shows in Zao's output of that time, as he began to develop his typical unrestrained and dynamic style. These are the bold, sweeping bushstrokes that first attract the observer's eye in "19.7.63", and at a closer look one finds that the interconnected powerful lines that dominate the picture are very reminiscent of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Zao originally came from old literati family, and from his early childhood he was a great admirer of the painting and calligraphy of Song Dynasty literati artist Mi Fu (1051-1107), whom he considered as the most outstanding calligrapher in Chinese history. Another painter he held in high esteem was Fan Kuan (c. 990-1030), particularly admiring his conception of nature. In Zao's view, the use of space in both Mi's calligraphy and Fan's landscape paintings has a lot in common with the work of Paul Cézanne. As for Zao's own work, French art critic Jean Leymarie describes it as "combining the poignancy of calligraphy with the flavor of painting."

Chinese-born painter Hsiao Chin once praised Zao as "the first painter to introduce the aesthetics of traditional Chinese art into the world of international painting". Hsiao also feels that painters such as America's Marc Tobey and Franz Kline, or France's Georges Mathieu, as well as numerous artists involved with action painting and non-objective representation, all derived much inspiration from Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. He even goes so far as to claim that much of the evolution of abstract painting between 1950 and 1960 was determined by the influx of calligraphic concepts from China and Japan, and that Zao Wou-ki was the epitome of this new direction in art. (cf. Yuan Teh-hsing, ed., Zao Wou-ki, Taipei: Yuan Cheng Publishers, 1980, p. 7)

In his book Masters of Chinese Painting: Zao Wou-ki, renowned Taiwanese art historian Hsiao Chiung-jui analyses the characteristics of Zao's style in the 1960s: "Brown and yellow tones dominate in Zao's work from the 60s, colors emanating a bronze-golden glow that are applied across the canvas with vigorous abandon to form lines and shapes of both refined subtlety and keen intensity - filamentary and just a touch frantic in quality. These lines are assembled in a free fashion without any concern for motif or preconceived notions. Zao shakes off all formal restraints and follows his inner vision, thereby revealing a profound and rich imagination that fills his compositions with primal energy and creates a world where the most dazzling beauty bursts from a wasteland." Undoubtedly, these words also capture many of the qualities of "19.7.63".

During the 1950s, Zao discovered the visual appeal and formative beauty of Chinese oracle bone and bronze inscriptions. There is some symbolism in the golden hues of bronze, suggesting the sacred, classical and cultured, as well as an atmosphere of bliss and prosperity. But in Zao's work, things are more complex than that: while the immediately appreciable aesthetic charm of his paintings speaks of the artist's success in sublimating his inner life, the somewhat frenzied fibrous lines responsible for much of the dynamic impetus also reveal a darker side dominated by ravaging turmoil and gloomy inner conflict. Some of this may be explained as an indirect expression of Zao's worries about the health of his wife, May. The pressure and melancholy he probably felt because of her sickness can be guessed from the way Zao, as he himself explains, frequently uses the palette knife to squeeze the paint firmly into the canvas, as if this would create an even more plastic effect of depth. But mostly, so the artist, the uninhibited application of color in sweeping strokes and spattered dabs, overlapping and chaotic, makes him feel calm and at ease. As he writes in his autobiography, "The fierce and intense, the clamorous and passionate have always attracted me much more than the quiet and the stationary. How to conquer space, how to shape and enliven it is a problem that is constantly on my mind." In the 1960s, for Zao painting meant meeting new challenges. It was a struggle to find his voice, his way of getting "inside space" and exploring his emotions. Since his 60s paintings are particularly brimming with vitality and creative energy, it is not surprising that Western art critics and dealers find Zao's output from this period among the most impressive in his entire oeuvre. It was a time of departure for the artist, of embarking on the pursuit of his ideals without looking back. This new hope and determination is communicated to the observer with almost painful poignancy, uplifting to heart and mind.