During a 1960 trip to the Bay Area, Willem de Kooning received an unexpected invitation to visit the printmaking studio at the University of California, Berkeley. During a moment alone there, he used a mop to cover the surfaces of two nearly four-foot-high lithograph stones with sweeping strokes of black ink. Each of the two stones was then printed in editions of fewer than ten; Litho #1 is the first of these two prints. The work’s gestural quality gives it an immediacy reminiscent of the artist’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. The visual impact of de Kooning’s first lithographs helped legitimize the print medium as a form of fine art production for American artists working in the 1960s and 1970s.