Craig Kauffman

Birds of Paradise, Mixed Media by Craig Kauffman, 1989

1989

Robert Craig Kauffman was born on March 31, 1932, in Los Angeles. He started painting regularly at age seven and went to the University of Southern California to study architecture in 1950. But art soon won out over architecture and he transferred to the University of California Los Angeles, to study painting. He earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees there. A breakthrough came in the early 1960s, when he experimented with painting on glass, but found it too fragile. He then painted on flat acrylic plastic. His next inspiration came from the plastic packaging increasingly used to wrap merchandise. He sought out craftsmen at commercial factories to learn the technique, Time magazine reported in 1968. The results were several series of three-dimensional wall hangings. Some were inspired by large plastic fruit clusters on the wall of a doughnut shop he frequented in Los Angeles. These lozenge-shaped reliefs were sometimes called "bubbles." Barbara Rose, in a catalog essay for an exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967, wrote, "Shaping the brittle sheet plastic into a series of voluptuous curves, Kauffman achieves a kind of abstract eroticism that is purely visual." Mr. Kauffman's work was shown in countless exhibitions and many one-man shows. It has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2006, one of Mr. Kauffman's reliefs fell from a wall of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, where it was part of an exhibition titled "Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital, 1955–85." It shattered. After storms of publicity, the Pompidou provided technical help and money to make a new version. Mr. Kauffman was married several times. He is survived by his daughters from his marriage to Dana Kauffman, from whom he was separated: Wilhelmina, Vida Rose and Georgia Kauffman. When they started in the 1960s, he and his artistic compatriots did not foresee a legacy, much less earning an income, Larry Bell, a prominent artist in the group, said in an interview on Wednesday. "The troops sort of banded together to be our audience," he said. "Every once in a while, we'd sell something and have a party."