ArtistKipniss, Robert

Artist Years1931-living

Artist NationalityAmerican

TitleBush

Year1971

MediumPrint > Lithograph

DimensionsComposition: 13.5 X 10 inches

Catalog ReferenceLunde 47

NotesRobert Kipniss was born in February 1, 1931 in Brooklyn, New York, to Simeon and Stella Kipniss, both of whom worked in Manhattan. His father, a Sunday painter, was employed for thirty-five years by Sears, Roebuck and Company as a layout director designing catalogue pages. Kipniss's mother, née Schwartz, drew fashion illustrations for many years for newspaper advertisements run by Gimbel's and other department stores. Kipniss's only sibling, a sister, Betty Ann, was born in 1936. The family moved to Laurelton, Long Island, that year and to Forest Hills, Queens, New York, in 1941. At age sixteen, Kipniss attended New York's Arts Students League on Saturdays. He began college in 1948, attending Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, for two years before transferring to the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1950. He began writing poetry in 1948. After graduating with a B.A. degree in English literature in 1952, Kipniss stayed at the university and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1954. By then he regarded himself primarily as a painter although he continued to write poetry.

In 1951 Kipniss was awarded a one-man show at the Creative Gallery, on 57th Street in Manhattan, as the result of a painting competition and showed semi-abstractions "suggesting romantic images of ethereal landscapes and half-grasped moments." In 1953 the Harry Salpeter Gallery, also on 57th Street, gave him his second one-man show.

In 1954 Kipniss and his wife, Jean, moved to Manhattan, and he continued to paint. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1956 and assigned to the Instructional Aids Division of the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Lee, Virginia, where his drawing skills were put to use in making training aids. Discharged in 1958, Kipniss returned with his wife to Manhattan. That year he received representation at the Contemporaries, a Manhattan gallery, and showed there in 1959 and 1960. He continued what had become a routine, painting by day and working at the Manhattan General Post Office during the evenings; by 1964, he was able to earn his living creating paintings.

Since 1965 Kipniss has had more than twenty-two museum and other institutional one-man exhibitions across the United States and abroad. His first institutional one-man exhibition was in 1965 at the Allen R. Hite Institute of the University of Louisville in Kentucky. The most recent of his several retrospectives, a five-decade print retrospective comprising eighty-six lithographs, mezzotints, and drypoints from the James F. White Collection, was shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2006 at the time of a celebratory reopening of the museum six months after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. In 1980 a large solo show of paintings and prints took place at the Museo La Tertulia in Cali, then and now one of Colombia's major art institutions.
(source: wikipedia.org)

Price $750.00

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