Biography from AskART:
| Robert Kipniss, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City in 1931. He creates essentially monochromatic, stylized vistas with natural and architectural elements intended to evoke an elegiac, nearly surrealistic mood in haunting, silent landscapes; the melancholy of nostalgia. Trees, in mid and far-distance, form clusters or act as misty individuals containing a haunted, indefinable presence, witnesses to the foreground drama of more specific shape, form and detail, often a close-up tree.
Kipniss studied at the Art Students League in 1947, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, 1948-50, and the University of Iowa, receiving a BA degree in English literature in 1952, an MFA in painting and art history in 1954. The artist employs a meticulous technique combining a multiplicity of specific strokes, whether with brush, pencil or print-maker's needle and burin, to create the essence of his generalized, non-specific forms.
Light and darkness are clearly Kipniss' compositionally constructive elements. They also exist as contestants in the emotional drama at the heart of each work of art. The contrast, and sometimes combat, between these two opposites, symbolically represent with blackness -- ideas of threat, fear, trouble, evil; with whiteness safety, redemption, fulfillment and good.
In Kipniss' 1995 mezzotint, "Clear Vase and Landscape," with a foreground image of precisely leafy stalks, the vase holding them, nearly invisible in its transparency, suggests an almost Salvador Dali-like surrealist device. This central image dominates but seems to invite association with, and commentary from, the surrounding clumps and individual round-topped, yet cedar-like trees. His "For Stella," 1997, also a mezzotint, depicts a gently twisting, curving, pale and smoothly-barked foreground, leafless tree limb or trunk, like a female human body, suggesting weakness, fatigue, an inability to deal with the staccato background screen of textured bush that seems to uncomfortably impinge upon it. This print is arguably a metaphor for a delicate soul struggling to overcome the prickly difficulties of domineering life.
The classic mezzotint process, invented in the middle of the 17th Century, is the reverse of most of the other print-making media, since the artist works from a black ground to increasingly lighter areas. The copper plate is first roughened by a "rocker," creating a burr over the entire surface (the more burr left intact, the more ink it holds, the darker the final finished print). The artist, Robert Kipniss, in this instance, gradually burnishes, smoothes down the burr in varying degrees to produce the gradations of lights and darks of the final design. The deepest darks in the final picture are those areas on the plate that have been little touched after the initial roughening.
Mezzotint relies on shade and tone rather than outline for its effect, which fits the Kipniss style of atmospheric masses of value. A recent oil painting by Robert Kipniss, "Hillside Silhouettes," 2001, 40 x 29, is somewhat more complex in composition than many, with four cubically-constructed houses each set in their own zones, seemingly unrelated to one another, with receding hills and similarly isolated, increasingly misty trees beyond.
In his career, Robert Kipniss has had over 40 one-man shows since the first in New York in 1951, including an important retrospective exhibition at the Associated American Artist Gallery, New York in 1977. Many of these one-man exhibitions have been mounted by over 50 museums in the United States, South America and Europe, including the Chicago Art Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modem Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress and British Museum in London.
Robert Kipniss is represented in the permanent collections of the institutions above, among many others, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Art Institute; Yale University Museum; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1980, and to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London in 1998
Robert Kipniss can be referenced in numerous publications, including Who's Who in American Art from the 1950s to the present, and multiple reviews in periodicals like Art News, Art in America and Art Forum. There are also three important catalogues raisonne published on his work.
Robert Kipniss has received many awards:
1965
Ohio University National Drawing Show, Purchase Prize
1976
National Academy of Design, New York City, The Ralph Fabri Prize
1978
The Print Club of Philadelphia, Charles M Lea Prize
1979
Charlotte Printmakers Society, Purchase Award
Society of American Graphic Artists, Printmaking Award
Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH, Honorary Doctorate
1980
Elected to the National Academy of Design, New York City
Audubon Artists, New York City, Silver Medal
National Academy of Design, New York City, The Leo Meissner Prize
1981
National Academy of Design, New York City, The Leo Meissner Prize
1983
Audubon Artists, New York City, Medal of Honour
1988
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City: Speicher-Hassam Purchase
Award
1989
Illinois College, Honorary Doctorate
1995
Albany Print Club Purchase Award, Albany NY
1996
Albany Print Club Presentation Print Commission
1997
Audubon Artists, New York City, The Louis Lozowick Award
The Boston Printmakers, Juror's Commendatio
National Academy of Design, New York City, Certificate of Merit
1998
Audubon Artists, New York City, The Daniel Serra-Badue Memorial Award
Silvermine Guild 22nd National Print Biennial, CT, Juror's Award
1999
The Boston Printmakers, The Rembrandt Graphics Award
National Academy of Design, New York City, The Cannon Prize
Robert Kipniss publications include
1964
Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Y Crowell, New York City, 26 Drawings
1966
Robert Graves: Collected Poems, Doubleday Anchor, New York City, Cover Painting
1980
Robert Kipniss, The Graphic Work, A catalogue raisonné, preface by Karl Lunde,
Abaris Books
1980-81
Robert Kipniss: The Graphic Work, Recent Prints, 1980-81, Edited by Richard
Lundgren, Art Connections Gallery
1981
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Limited Editions Club, New York City, 10
original lithographs bound in each volume
1996
Printmaking Experiences in Printmaking Today, Spring 1996, London
SOURCES
http://www.redfern-gallery.co.uk/pages/artistinfo/212.html
http://gasoftware.freeyellow.com/def.htm
http://www.weinstein.com/kipniss/images.html
http://parkwestgallery.acmeinfo.com/pwg0Info/bios/kipniss.htm
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