Raimonds Staprаns

Woman portrait. 1955, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 40.6 cm

1955

Raimonds Staprans (Latvian: Raimonds Staprāns; born 1926) is an artist and playwright in both the United States and his native Latvia. He is known for his paintings of still-lifes and landscapes and for his plays set in Latvia. Public collections holding Staprans' work include the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum. A career retrospective of his art opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in March 2006 and was shown at the Hackett-Freedman Gallery before it traveled to Riga, Latvia, where it was exhibited in the Latvian National Museum of Art later that year. A 60-year retrospective exhibit entitled "Full Spectrum: Paintings by Raimonds Staprans" opened in June 2017 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, and then moved to the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, California, in February 2018. Staprans' still life and landscape paintings are notable for the artist's sensitive response to light and color. A recent review of his work exhibited in Los Angeles compared the "tasteful seriousness" of his paintings to that of Cézanne. Staprans is said to examine the "architecture" of everyday objects in his art using explosive color and flattened compositions, creating a "tension between representation and abstraction that plays with viewers' expectations." Staprans is also a playwright. Most of his plays are set in Latvia during the 20th century. His play "The Freezing" was produced in 1979 by the San Francisco Little Theater and the Latvian National Theater in 1980. His 1989 play, "Four Days in June", depicted the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940. It was performed in Riga to more than 100 sold-out audiences, and later won first prize in the Baltic Theatre Festival. "Four Days in June" is regarded as having played an integral part in the pro-democracy movement in Latvia during the momentous changes following the end of the Soviet Union. In 2003, Staprans was awarded Latvia's highest civilian honor, the Order of the Three Stars, the Latvian equivalent of the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.