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Lawrence Kupferman (1909-1982) 1970 Pacific Coast #9 Painting - $1,300 (Johnston, Rhode Island)
condition:
excellent
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Please call me at show contact info with any questions or to view the painting with no obligations to buy. Thank you, Tom.
This painting was part of series of coastal abstracts that the artist was working on in the early 1970's while traveling with wife in Southern California. The painting also incorporates another favored technique of the artist, microscopic marine life. The painting is in overall very good condition. Under a black light it shows no signs of paint loss, in-painting or repair. Please view all of the images that I provided as they are an accurate representation of the paintings condition. I am happy to answer any of your questions prior to bidding.
Without the matte and frame, he sight size of the painting measures 21" in height x 30" wide and together with the matte and two-toned gun metal colored wooden frame it measures 29" x 39". The handsome frame has a depth of 1 1/2" and is in overall very good condition with a couple of very minor surface abrasions. This original Mid-Century abstract is an excellent example of the artist's work. It will make for a welcome addition to any savvy art connoisseur's collection!
As for the artist, Lawrence Kupferman (1909-1982) was an American painter associated with the Boston Expressionist School in the early 1940's, and later, with Abstract Expressionism. He chaired the Painting department at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he was known for introducing innovative practices and techniques. Lawrence Kupferman has long been an influential member of the Boston art scene, and a nationally recognized artist as well. He belongs to what is termed the "second generation" of Boston painters, which include artists such as Leonard Baskin, Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom.
These artists moved away form the prevailing styles of academism and impressionism, towards an art which in the 1930's and 40's was socially-conscious and satirical, and by the late 1940's and early 50's developed into personal styles and forms which were new and largely abstract. This is the generation of painters which made the United States the leader in modern art. Kupferman's career in itself demonstrates the struggles and transitions undergone, and the immense contributions made by artists during this important period.
Lawrence Kupferman was born in Boston on March 25, 1909, the son of Samuel and Rose Kupferman, and was brought up in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Like his contemporaries, Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom, he grew up in a working class family. His father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant who worked as a cigar maker. In 1914, when Lawrence was just five years old, his mother died. He was not told of her passing and was sent to live with his grandparents. He waited and expected his mother to return, filling hours by drawing. Two years later, he was devastated to learn the truth, his mother had passed.
Antisemitism was pervasive in Boston at the time, and Kupferman was bullied as a child. Years later he recalled, "Being a short, homely kid in a predominatly Irish-Catholic, snobby town, I admit, I was a lonely, misunderstood, introverted boy. I vowed when I was eight, that I'd never be narrow-sighted, deceitful, or mean like the children and adults with whom I grew up."
Kupferman attended the Boston Latin School and took part in the high school art program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the late 1920's he studied drawing under Philip Leslie Hale at the Museum School, an experience he called "stultifying and repressive." Kupferman stated "Hale was rigid, straight-laced, unfriendly and too restrictive. He didn't allow any freedom of expression and I craved to find that in art. Beyond that, I considered the Boston School passé." While there he also studied with H. Alden Ripley.
In 1932, he transferred to the Massachusetts College of Art where he studied with Ernest L. Major and Otis Philbrick, he received his B.S. in education in 1935. It was there that he also met and married fellow artist Ruth Cobb. They were married in 1937, during the Depression. In those years, 1937-1940, he was employed for $23.50 a week in the Federal Art Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.). Kupferman's production consisted mostly of etchings and some easel paintings. It is during this time that he produced his drypoints of Victorian mansions, working in minute and accurate detail.
In 1941 he began teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art. During this time he began incorporating more expressionistic forms into his paintings, he entered a phase with his treatment of the slums in the south end of Roxbury, Massachusetts being a prime example. From then on his work became increasingly abstract. In 1943, Kupferman was elected as an associate member of the National Academy of Design in New York. By this point he was working not only in drypoint, but also watercolor, oil, egg tempera and encaustic and emulsion-tempera on gesso panels.
During World War II, Hitler's atrocities against the Jews enraged Kupferman. His broad humanity surfaced within his paintings, infernos of melting colors in Holocaust figures. Pregnant, illusive female figures and haunting male heads dissolve into vanishing realities that are kept present in paint. Similarly, his cityscapes often expressed outrage at the horrors of the war.
In 1946 he returned to the Boston Museum School to study with the influential German-American painter Karl Zerbe. All the while, Kupferman was still teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he eventually became the chairman of the painting department, retiring in 1969. Students remember him as an excellent teacher, a man of tremendous energy and vitality who infected his students with his own enthusiasm for art and life.
The year 1946 marked a dramatic change in style for Kupferman. The War was over and the birth of his son, David, following his daughter Nancy who was born in 1943, added to a new optimism and interest in the growth of life (for the record, both of their children would go on to became successful artists themselves). During this time he and his family spent the summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This and subsequent summers on Cape Cod brought him in contact with important painters, including Hans Hofmann, Adolf Gottlieb, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack and other abstract painters.
Beginning in that year Kupferman was inspired to change from his expressionist cityscapes of scorched souls to abstractions based on studies of microscopic marine life, inventing a poured paint technique that later became a characteristic technique of color field painters. More importantly, the microscopic works represent the beginning of an original abstract style. The emphasis was not on rendering what was under the microscope but to reveal the cosmic nature of creation even in life's most minute forms, which has continued as the underlying theme of all his work.
As stated in a letter to a friend, " I...try to suggest, at least, the wonderful dense complexity of matter, or indeed, of being. The miracle of being. I try to allude to the atomic structure, to the ceaseless spinning movements, the endless pulsations inherent in all beings. The vibrations of colors in my paintings are developed to set in motion the suggestions of the endless movements."
In this period of the emerging style of abstract expressionism, Kupferman was actively exhibiting with his contemporaries in New York and Boston and regularly received attention from newspaper reviews and magazines such as Time and Art News. As early as 1943, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. He has said of himself, "I am simply a poet who writes his poetry with a brush loaded with color rather than words."
Kupferman states "I started to pour paint onto canvases in Provincetown. Jackson Pollack 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. "I want paint to find its own way on the canvas, just as if it were a person discovering his or her way in life...My personal background has a lot to do with why I have that goal."
Works from these years include Kaleidoscope Life of the Tide (1948) and Tidal Maze (1948). Around the same time Kupferman began exhibiting his work at the Boris Mirski Gallery on Newberry Street in Boston.
In the late 1960's, Kupferman introduced his parents to Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The orientation of this philosophy toward tapping the inner flow of the universe was of natural appeal to Kupferman. It was also during this time and the early 70's, that he and his wife spent their winters in Mexico and on the coast of Southern California. His beautiful color studies of poured paint from 1970 Of the Ocean Shore, Pacific 4, and Sea Structure, are only a few of many works inspired by the colors and forms of sea and sand. As mentioned, the painting that I am offering today, Pacific Shore #9 California 1970 is fine example of his work from this period, as it captures several of Kupferman's signature techniques.
During a span of years that stretched from 1944 to 1974, Kupferman had over thirty One-Man Exhibitions. His work is represented in the permanent collections of over 20 museums and institutions including but no limited to the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress, Washington, just to name a few.
In 1978, the artist said somberly, "I'll be remembered, I hope, as someone who was authentic...someone who felt and tried to understand experiences...as an artist who was as truthful as he could be. Of course, being human has its limitations, but I've tried to be a meaningful contributor...a responsible voice. I am a political animal who is interested in the big picture of justice and humanity. If I am wrong about an afterlife, I hope to live in my work. If I had to do it all over again, I'd want to be me and do what I've done. My goal was to show that every living creature has an invaluable, imminent covenant with creation."
Lawrence Edward Kupferman passed away from Parkinson's disease in Boston on October 2, 1982.
Again, please call me at show contact info with any questions or to view the painting with no obligations to buy. Thank you, Tom.