Lawrence Kupferman Art

Mid-century artist Lawrence Kupferman paints a madly eerie New York street scene. An exaggerated upward view of two 19th-century walk-ups is split by a forced perspective of a downwa...

Lawrence Kupferman, 'Fantasia Americana – 1880', drypoint etching with sandground, 1943. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Series A, 1971 2/6' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on heavy, cream wove paper, with full margins (2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches); the paper slightly lightened within the original mat opening, otherwise in excellent condition. One of only 6 impressions printed in 1971, with the added sandground grey background tint. Image size 11 13/16 x 14 3/4 inches; sheet size 18 x 20 1/4 inches. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Collections: National Gallery of Art, Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University). ABOUT THE ARTIST Lawrence Kupferman (1909 - 1982) was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston and grew up in a working-class family. He attended the Boston Latin School and participated in the high school art program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the late 1920s, he studied drawing under Philip Leslie Hale at the Museum School—an experience he called 'stultifying and repressive'. In 1932 he transferred to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he first met his wife, the artist Ruth Cobb. He returned briefly to the Museum School in 1946 to study with the influential expressionist German-American painter Karl Zerbe. Kupferman held various jobs while pursuing his artistic career, including two years as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During the 1930s he worked as a drypoint etcher for the Federal Art Project, creating architectural drawings in a formally realistic style—these works are held in the collections of the Fogg Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the 1940s he began incorporating more expressionistic forms into his paintings as he became progressively more concerned with abstraction. In 1946 he began spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and other abstract painters. At about the same time he began exhibiting his work at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston. In 1948, Kupferman was at the center of a controversy involving hundreds of Boston-area artists. In February of that year, the Boston Institute of Modern Art issued a manifesto titled 'Modern Art and the American Public' decrying 'the excesses of modern art,' and announced that it was changing its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The poorly conceived statement, intended to distinguish Boston's art scene from that of New York, was widely perceived as an attack on modernism. In protest, Boston artists such as Karl Zerbe, Jack Levine, and David Aronson formed the 'Modern Artists Group' and organized a mass meeting. On March 21, 300 artists, students, and other supporters met at the Old South Meeting House and demanded that the ICA retract its statement. Kupferman chaired the meeting and read this statement to the press: “The recent manifesto of the Institute is a fatuous declaration which misinforms and misleads the public concerning the integrity and intention of the modern artist. By arrogating to itself the privilege of telling the artists what art should be, the Institute runs counter to the original purposes of this organization whose function was to encourage and to assimilate contemporary innovation.” The other speakers were Karl Knaths...

Lawrence Kupferman, 'European Landscape', drypoint, edition 50, 1942. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '7/50' in pencil. A superb, finely nuanced impression, on cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (1 to 1 3/4 inches); in excellent condition. Image size 10 7/8 x 13 3/8 inches; sheet size 13 1/8 x 16 1/2 inches. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. An impression of this work is included in the permanent collection of the Syracuse University Art Museum. ABOUT THE ARTIST Lawrence Kupferman (1909 - 1982) was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston and grew up in a working-class family. He attended the Boston Latin School and participated in the high school art program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the late 1920s, he studied drawing under Philip Leslie Hale at the Museum School—an experience he called 'stultifying and repressive'. In 1932 he transferred to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he first met his wife, the artist Ruth Cobb. He returned briefly to the Museum School in 1946 to study with the influential expressionist German-American painter Karl Zerbe. Kupferman held various jobs while pursuing his artistic career, including two years as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During the 1930s he worked as a drypoint etcher for the Federal Art Project, creating architectural drawings in a formally realistic style—these works are held in the collections of the Fogg Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the 1940s he began incorporating more expressionistic forms into his paintings as he became progressively more concerned with abstraction. In 1946 he began spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and other abstract painters. At about the same time he began exhibiting his work at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston. In 1948, Kupferman was at the center of a controversy involving hundreds of Boston-area artists. In February of that year, the Boston Institute of Modern Art issued a manifesto titled 'Modern Art and the American Public' decrying 'the excesses of modern art,' and announced that it was changing its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The poorly conceived statement, intended to distinguish Boston's art scene from that of New York, was widely perceived as an attack on modernism. In protest, Boston artists such as Karl Zerbe, Jack Levine, and David Aronson formed the 'Modern Artists Group' and organized a mass meeting. On March 21, 300 artists, students, and other supporters met at the Old South Meeting House and demanded that the ICA retract its statement. Kupferman chaired the meeting and read this statement to the press: “The recent manifesto of the Institute is a fatuous declaration which misinforms and misleads the public concerning the integrity and intention of the modern artist. By arrogating to itself the privilege of telling the artists what art should be, the Institute runs counter to the original purposes of this organization whose function was to encourage and to assimilate contemporary innovation.” The other speakers were Karl Knaths...

Lawrence Kupferman was born in the Boston area (b.1909 - d.1982) , and he became one of the most important abstract artists to emerge from there in the early 1940s. Kupferman worked as an artist for the WPA in the 1930s, developing a strictly realist style that depicted Victorian houses and other detailed architectural images. Around 1943 Kupferman began to integrate more expressionistic forms into his works. He soon moved completely away from recognizable subject matter and definitively became an abstract painter. In 1946 he studied with the influential German-born artist Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Kupferman later attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where he would become a professor and retire as its Head of Painting in 1969. His focus, as it would remain until the late 1960s, was on abstract, marinelike amoeboid forms—intimated, rather than strictly described. Kupferman was an active participant in a huge thrust in Boston art in the 1940s to create a vibrant art scene that rivaled New York. He has been appropriately credited with bringing Abstract Expressionism to Boston, serving as a critical artistic conduit to New York painters such as Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann, contacts he made in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spent his summers beginning in 1946. Kupferman’s unique brand of abstraction integrated with the already burgeoning figurative expressionism in Boston, and he showed at the Boris Mirksi Gallery, arguably the most important Boston gallery...

Signed lower right: "Kupferman". Inscribed lower right: "1204". Titled, signed, dated, and inscribed verso: "EG: 1,204.J / "September Landscape, 1967" / Lawrence Kupferman". From the...

Signed lower right: "Kupferman". Inscribed lower right: "2317". Titled, signed, dated, and inscribed verso: "GK:2,317.D / "Pacific Tide Pool" / Lawrence Kupf...

30X21.25 without the frame. Mixed Media painting and drawing on paper. Lawrence Kupferman had a long and illustrious career as an artist and educator. His work has been exhibited at ...

Silkscreen on paper. with some sort of experimental poured stuff on it. there is some loss to the margin but the image is strong. edition 2/6. During the 1930s, Lawrence Edward Kupferman was employed by the WPA Works Progress Administration, making a series of etchings and dry points, mostly of the facades of houses. His style changed completely in the 1940s, becoming first political and expressionist, and later abstract expressionist. He served as chairman of the department of painting at the Massachusetts College of Arts.He studied at the Boston Museum School with Philip Leslie Hale and H. Alden Ripley (1929-1931); Massachusetts School of Art with Ernest L. Majors and Otis Philbrick (1931-1935). Kupferman took motifs from tangible and sensed realities. His atmospheres symbolize cosmic space. Existence is spiritualized as a connected covenant with all of creation. Veil-like, mysterious lines move like vapors over washes of opaque translucent colors that blend, erupt or fade into seas of time-like space and souls become one with an ever-moving, deepening milieu. He admitted, "My figures journey to greet an eternal fellowship with nature’s every particle. . . . "Around 1941, I started to pour paint onto canvases in Provincetown. Jackson Pollock came into my studio to observe how I let paint take on a liquid life or path of its own. Those ethereal poured paintings may have stimulated Pollock's more frantic splashed-on techniques” Kupferman said thoughtfully.Some critics gave him credit for having been one of the pioneering fathers of the poured painting technique. As early as 1943, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and various publications acknowledged him as a humanistic innovator whose work bluntly exposes humans to themselves. Kupferman, Jack Levine (b. 1915), Hyman Bloom (b. 1913) and David Aronson (b. 1923) founded the "The Boston Urban Jewish School," whose roots ran deep into traditional Hebraic scholarship."Throughout my career," Kupferman admitted, "Boston was a mental and physical prison in which genuineness and spontaneity in art was absent. I summered in Provincetown for artistic sanity. Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, Leo Manzu, Byron Brown...

Kupferman, Lawrence. FANTASIA AMERICANA. Etching, 1943. 2d edition of 100(c. 1980) with the embossed stmp of the printer. 12 x 14 3/8 inches (Plate); 17 x 19 7/8 inches (sheet). Sig...