Skip to main content

Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

b. 1931

Robert Kipniss was born in 1931 in New York City. He has studied at the Art Students League, Wittenberg University and the University of Iowa, where he received his BA and MFA in painting and art history. Kipniss spent many years making lithographs from stone, aluminum and Mylar plastic. He then switched to pre rocked mezzotint plates of copper, which create his signature soft and dreamy images. Kipniss's works are in the Metropolitan, Boston MFA and the Smithsonian, among many.

to
3
3
2
1
1
2
Overall Height
to
Overall Width
to
3
2
1
1
1
1
3
18
562
395
350
305
3
Artist: Robert Kipniss
Landscape
By Robert Kipniss
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork "Landscape" c.1980 is an original color lithograph on wove paper by noted American artist Robert Kipniss, b.1931. It is hand signed and numbered 168/200 in pencil by the...
Category

Late 20th Century American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Landscape with Trees
By Robert Kipniss
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork "Landscape with Trees" c.1980 is an original lithograph on wove paper by noted American artist Robert Kipniss, b.1931. It is hand si...
Category

Late 20th Century American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Silver Trees
By Robert Kipniss
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork titled "Silver Trees" c.1970 is an original lithograph on wove paper by noted American artist Robert Kipniss, b.1931. It is hand signed and nu...
Category

Late 20th Century American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Related Items
Old Village, Modern Lithograph by Millard Sheets
By Millard Sheets
Located in Long Island City, NY
Old Village by Millard Owen Sheets, American (1907–1989) Circa 1977 Lithograph on Arches, signed and numbered in pencil Edition of 250, AP Image Si...
Category

1970s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Gateside Conversation, 1940s Original Signed Lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in Denver, CO
'Gateside Conversation' is an original signed lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) from 1946. Singed by the artist in the lower right margin and titled verso. Portrays a figu...
Category

1940s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Lithograph

Arc de Triomphe in Snow (Napoleon's Triumphal Arch)
By Ellison Hoover
Located in Storrs, CT
Arc de Triomphe in Snow (Napoleon's Triumphal Arch). c. 1930. Lithograph printed in grey ink. 11 1/4 x 9 7/16 (sheet 16 x 12). A tonal impression printe...
Category

1930s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original "Back Our Girls Over There, YWCA vintage WW1 poster
By Clarence Underwood
Located in Spokane, WA
Original Back Our Girls Over There Y.W.C.A. WW1 antique poster: Linen-backed original Beautiful Y.W.C.A. Telephone operator sitting at the control pane...
Category

1910s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original 'Bundesbahn durch das Gastliches Deutschland' vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Linen-backed original German / Germany culinary map in excellent condition. MIT DER DEUTSCHEN BUNDESBAHN DURCH DAS GASTLICHE DEUTSCHLAND. Mit der Deutschen Bundesbahn durch das Gastliche Deutschland (With Deutsche Bundesbahn through Hospitable Germany). A map of Germany showing all the food and wine features in various regions and cities. If you go to Germany and want to find the origins of foods, this will lead you to the correct city. From wine, bread, fish, cookies, spat, prezels, pork, bier, french...
Category

1950s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Past and Present, Lithograph by Remo Farruggio
By Remo Michael Farruggio
Located in Long Island City, NY
Past and Present Remo Farruggio, Italian/American (1904–1981) Date: Circa 1979 Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil Edition of 300, AP 35 Image Size: 20.5 x 28 inches Size: 27 i...
Category

1980s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Ruins of Central City, Vintage 1935 Framed Colorado Modernist Landscape
By Vance Kirkland
Located in Denver, CO
Vintage lithograph titled "Ruins of Central City 31/70" is a modernist landscape with decaying buildings and mountains by Vance Hall Kirkland, from 1935. Presented in a custom black frame with archival materials, outer dimensions measure 25 ⅞ x 29 ⅜ x ⅝ inches. Image sight size is 14 x 17 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Variously referred to as the "Father of Modern Colorado Painting", "Dean of Colorado Artists", and "Colorado’s pre-eminent artist," Kirkland was an inventive, visionary painter who spent fifty-two years of his fifty-four-year career in Denver. Of the approximately 1,200 paintings he created, about 550 from the first half of his career (1927-1953) are water-based media: acquarelle, gouache, casein and egg tempera, with a few oils. In the latter half of his career (1953-1981) he used oil and his unique oil and water mixture. He also produced five hundred drawings and some ten prints, mostly lithographs on stone, while also engaged in teaching full-time for most of the period. To show people "something they have never seen before and new ways to look at things," he felt he needed to preserve his artistic freedom. Consequently, he chose to spend his entire professional career in Denver far removed from the established American art centers in the East and Midwest. "By minding my own business and working on my own," he said, "I think it was possible to develop in this part of the country… I’ve developed my kind of work [and] I think my paintings are stronger for having worked that way." The geographical isolation resulting from his choice to stay in Colorado did not impede his creativity, as it did other artists, but in fact contributed to his unique vision. The son of a dentist, who was disappointed with his [son’s] choice of art as a career, Kirkland flunked freshman watercolor class in 1924 at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) for putting colors into his landscapes that did not exist in nature and for competing colors. Not dissuaded, he won first prize for his watercolors in his junior and senior years. [While in Cleveland,] he studied with three influential teachers. Henry Keller, included in the prestigious New York Armory Show in 1913, introduced him to designed realism which he later used in his Colorado landscapes in the 1930s and 1940s. His other teachers were Bill Eastman, who studied with Hans Hofmann and appreciated all the new movements in modern art, and Frank Wilcox, a fine watercolorist. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Kirkland concurrently took liberal arts courses at Western Reserve and the Cleveland School of Education and taught two freshman courses in watercolor and design, receiving his diploma in painting from the school in 1927 by doing four years of work in three. The following year he received a Bachelor of Education in Art degree from the same institution. In 1929 he assumed the position of founding director of the University of Denver’s School of Art, originally known as the Chappell School of Art. He resigned three years later when the university reneged on its agreement to grant its art courses full recognition toward a Bachelor of Arts degree. His students prevailed on him to continue teaching, resulting in the Kirkland School of Art which he opened in 1932 at 1311 Pearl Street in Denver. The building, where he painted until his death in 1981, formerly was the studio of British-born artist, Henry Read, designer of the City of Denver Seal and one of the original thirteen charter members of the Artists’ Club of Denver, forerunner of the Denver Art Museum. The Kirkland School of Art prospered for the next fourteen years with its courses accredited by the University of Colorado Extension Center in Denver. The teaching income from his art school and his painting commissions helped him survive the Great Depression. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts commissioned from him two post office murals, Cattle Roundup (1938, Eureka, Kansas), and Land Rush (1940, Sayre, Oklahoma). He also did murals for several Denver clients: the Gerald Hughes mansion (1936, later demolished), Arthur Johnson home (1936-37, Seven Drinks of Man), Albany Hotel (1937, later demolished), Neustetter’s Department Store (1937, "History of Costume," three of five saved in 1987 before the building interior was demolished in advance of its condo conversion), and the Denver Country Club (1945, partially destroyed and later painted over). In 1953 the Ford Times, published by the Ford Motor Company, commissioned Kirkland along with fellow Denver artists, William Sanderson and Richard Sorby, to paint six watercolors each for the publication. Their work appeared in articles [about] Colorado entitled, "Take to the High Road" (of the Colorado Rockies) by Alicita and Warren Hamilton. Kirkland sketched the mountain passes and high roads in the area of Mount Evans, Independence Pass near Aspen, and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1946 Kirkland closed his art school when the University of Denver rehired him as director of its School of Art and chairman of the Division of Arts and Humanities. In 1957 the University gave him its highest honor – the "University Lecturer Award." When he retired in 1969 as Professor of Art Emeritus to become a full-time painter, the School of Arts was the university’s largest undergraduate department. In 1971 Governor John Love presented Kirkland the State of Colorado Arts and Humanities Award. In addition to his dual positions as artist and teacher in Denver for more than half a century, he served the Denver Art Museum as a trustee, chairman of the accessions committee, member of the exhibitions committee, curator of European and American art, and honorary curator of painting and sculpture. He also won the battle with the museum’s old guard to establish a department of modern and contemporary art. Additionally, he was one of the fifty-two founding members of the Denver Artists Guild which included most of Colorado’s leading artists who greatly contributed to the state’s cultural history. Kirkland developed five major painting periods during his life encompassing various series with some chronological overlap: Designed Realism (1927-1944); Surrealism (1939-1954); Hard Edge Abstraction, including the Timberline Abstraction Series (1947-1957); Abstract Expressionism with four series – Nebulae, Roman, Asian, and Pure Abstractions (1951-1964); and the Dot Paintings with five series – Energy of Vibrations, Mysteries, Explosions, Forces, and Pure Abstractions (1963-1981). Nevadaville (1931), a watercolor, belongs to Kirkland’s initial period of Designed Realism. Adapting nature by redesigning the realism he saw on location in Colorado allowed him to be "more concerned with the importance of the painting rather than the importance of the landscape." He noted that the rhythms his Cleveland teacher, Henry Keller, "found in nature created a certain movement in his paintings… [that moved] away from the static element of a lot of realistic, representational painting." Kirkland, along with fellow watercolorist Elisabeth Spalding, were some of the first Denver artists interesting themselves in Colorado’s nineteenth-century mining towns west of Denver. They offered an alternative to the overwrought cowboy and Indian subject matter of the previous generation; while the human and architectural components of the mining towns provided a welcome break from the predominant nineteenth-century landscape tradition. Vibrations of Two Yellows in Space (1970), one of Kirkland’s small subseries of "Open Sun Paintings," occupies the final phase in his first series of dot paintings, Energy of Vibrations in Space (1963-1972). Many pieces in the series incorporate his unique mixture of oil paint and water which he developed in the early 1950s. The work in the subseries – a challenge to the viewer’s optic nerve – constitutes his contribution to the international realm of Op Art. Recalling the theory of pulsating galaxies and the universe, he used dots applied with dowels of different sizes to surround and leave round open spaces letting the gradient background show through. Because of the color contrast between the two, the "suns" either recede into the background or jump out in the foreground, creating the powerful pulsing effect. During his lifetime he assembled on a limited budget an extensive collection of fine and decorative art and furniture. His collecting passion dated from his student days when he used his prize money from the Cleveland School of Art to purchase a watercolor by William Eastman and a now-famous set of Russian musician figures by Alexander Blazys, both of whom were his professors. After Kirkland’s death, the Denver Art Museum received a large bequest that included paintings by Roberto Matta, Gene Davis, Charles Burchfield, and Richard Anuszkiewicz (the two latter-named also alumni of the Cleveland Institute of Art); prints by Arthur B. Davies, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Rauschenberg; and a sculpture by Ossip Zadkine. Kirkland posthumously was the subject of a television documentary, "Vance Kirkland’s Visual Language," aired on over one hundred PBS television stations (1994-96), and in 1999 a six-scene biographical ballet choreographed by Martin Friedmann with scenario provided by Hugh Grant, founder and director of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art in Denver. Historic Denver also posthumously honored Kirkland as part of the Colorado 100. From 1997 to 2000 Kirkland’s solo exhibition was hosted by thirteen European museums: Fondazione Muduma, Milan; Sala Parpalló Museum Complex, València; Stadtmuseum, Düsseldorf; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; Kiscelli Múzeum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague; National Museum, Warsaw; State Gallery of the Art of Poland, Sopot/Gdańsk, National Museum of Art, Kaunas, Lithuania; Latvian Foreign Art Museum, Riga; and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Solo Exhibitions: Denver Art Museum (1930, 1935, 1939-40, 1942, 1972, 1978-retrospective, 1988, 1998); Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1943); Knoedler & Company, New York (1946, 1948, 1952); Pogzeba Art Gallery, Denver (1959); Galleria Schneider, Rome (1960); Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery, Lindsborg, Kansas (1964-65,1977); Genesis Galleries, Ltd., New York (1978); Valhalla Gallery, Wichita, Kansas (1979); Inkfish Gallery, Denver (1980); Colorado State University, Fort Collins (1981- memorial exhibition); Boulder Center for the Visual Arts (1985); University of Denver, Schwayder Art Gallery (1991). Group Exhibitions (selected): "May Show," Cleveland Museum of Art (1927-28); "Western Annuals," Denver Art Museum (1929-1957, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1971); "International Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, Drawings and Monotypes," Art Institute of Chicago (1930-1946); "Abstract and Surrealist American Art," Art Institute of Chicago (1947-48, traveled to ten other American museums); "Midwest Artists Exhibition," Kansas City Art Institute (1932, 1937, 1939-1942); Dallas Museum of Art (1933, 1960); San Diego Museum of Art (1941); "Artists for Victory," Metropolitan Museum of Art (1942); "United Nations Artists in America," Argent Galleries, New York (1943); "California Watercolor Society," Los Angeles County Museum (1943-1945); "Survey of Romantic Painting," Museum of Modern Art, New York (1945); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (1945, 1951); Knoedler & Company, New York (1946-57; co-show with Max Ernest, 1950; co-show with Bernard Buffet, 1952); Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (1948, 1956); Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1951); "Contemporary American Painting," University of Illinois, Urbana (1952); University of Utah, Salt Lake (1952-53); Oakland Art Museum (1954-55); "Reality and Fantasy, 1900-54," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1954); "Art U.S.A.," Madison Square Garden, New York (1958); Roswell Museum and Art Center, New Mexico (1961); Burpee Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois (1965-68); University of Arizona Art...
Category

1930s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Paper, Lithograph

Original "Children's Year" vintage poster. The health of the child is the power
Located in Spokane, WA
Original "Children's Year" Health of the Child is Power of the Nation vintage poster. Archival linen backed original 1919 horizontal. Lathrop, the Children's Bureau's first director, soon commissioned several studies to investigate the causes and conditions of infant mortality. She wanted hard data to dispel the notions that child death was inevitable or an act of God, and to prove that infant mortality was not about genetics but rather environment. Lathrop's research showed that children often died from infections and conditions that could be prevented. To spread the facts, the Bureau published a series of advice pamphlets on infant care. Children's Bureau under Lathrop created a powerful, lasting legacy in the U.S. — the idea that every child has a right to a childhood. "That every kid has a right to dependency," she says. "That they don't have to support themselves, and that the government is the parent of last resort if everything else fails." Rare horizontal poster...
Category

1910s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Prodigal Son
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
A fine impression with full margins published by Associated American Artists with their information label present - pictured in Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1815-...
Category

1930s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Prodigal Son
Prodigal Son
H 19.25 in W 22 in D 1.75 in
Down the River
By Thomas Hart Benton
Located in London, GB
A fine impression of this popular Benton image with good margins.
Category

1930s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Down the River
Down the River
H 21.5 in W 18.5 in D 1.5 in
Mine Near Continental Divide, Black White Colorado Mountain Landscape Winter
By Arnold Rönnebeck
Located in Denver, CO
Lithograph on paper titled 'Mine Near Continental Divide' by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947) from 1933. Depicts a black and white winter scene of a mine in the mountains with snow on the rooftops and hillsides. Presented in a custom frame measuring 18 ¼ x 22 ¼ inches. Image size measures 10 ¼ x 14 ½ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Arnold Ronnebeck Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...
Category

1930s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph, Paper

Mexican Travelers, Modern Lithograph by Millard Sheets
By Millard Sheets
Located in Long Island City, NY
Mexican Travelers by Millard Owen Sheets, American (1907–1989) Date: Circa 1977 Lithograph on Arches paper, signed and numbered in pencil Edition o...
Category

1970s American Modern Robert Kipniss Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Robert Kipniss figurative prints for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Robert Kipniss figurative prints available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Robert Kipniss in lithograph and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Robert Kipniss figurative prints, so small editions measuring 17 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of John French Sloan, Caroline Durieux, and Otto Kuhler. Robert Kipniss figurative prints prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1,200 and tops out at $2,200, while the average work can sell for $1,350.

Recently Viewed

View All