Robert Kipniss (born Brooklyn, New York, February 1, 1931) is an American painter and printmaker. His mature paintings, lithographs, mezzotints, and drypoints share stylistic characteristics and subject matter and typically depict trees seen close up or at varying distances in fields. Other works show one or more houses in a landscape or town setting. Some are interiors with a view toward a window or with a still life set close to one, frequently with a landscape beyond. No human figures are present, and all forms are reduced to essentials. The time is often dusk or nighttime. Kipniss' use of exceptionally subtle black and white tones or, less often, lightly toned hues creates an overall atmospheric effect.Robert Kipniss:Paintings and Poetry 1950–1964; Preface, "Comments by the Artist and Poet" by Robert Kipniss; Introduction, "Ut Pictura Poesis: The Coming of Age of Robert Kipniss," by Marshall N. Price; "Remembrance and Prophecy: The Journey of a Poet-Painter" by Robin Magowan (New York: The Artist Book Foundation, 2013).Robert Kipniss: Paintings 1950–2005; Foreword by E. John Bullard; "Solitude and Silence: The Paintings of Robert Kipniss" by Richard J. Boyle; "Notes from the Studio" by Robert Kipniss (New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2007).Daniel Piersol, Seen in Solitude: Robert Kipniss Prints from the James F. White Collection; "Collector's Statement" by James F. White; "Seen in Solitude: Prints by Robert Kipniss" by Daniel Piersol; "Soliloquy: Kipniss on Kipniss" by Robert Kipniss (New Orleans, Louisiana: New Orleans Museum of Art, 2005).Robert Kipniss: Intaglios 1982–2004, Catalogue Raisonné; Introduction and Documentation by Trudie A. Grace; "Robert Kipniss: In-Between" by Thomas Piché Jr.; Chronology (New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2004).Robert Kipniss: The Graphic Work; Preface by Karl Lunde (New York: Abaris Books, 1980). His works have been described as conveying solitude and inward experience."Art in New York," Time 87, no. 5 (4 February 1966). Lunde, in Graphic Work, on "individual in isolation," 15. Bullard, Foreword, in Paintings, on "meditative silence" in Kipniss's paintings and prints, x. Kipniss often uses the subject matter of a painting in a lithograph or mezzotint, sometimes with variations. His paintings date from the early 1950s. His main body of prints are lithographs and mezzotints, the former dating from 1968 into 1994, the latter since 1990.
From 1998-2024, Kipniss maintained studios on the Hudson River in Westchester County, New York and at his home in northwestern Connecticut. He married his second wife, Laurie Lisle, a writer, in 1994. He has four children from his first marriage, in 1954, to Jean Prutton. They were divorced in 1982.Chronology, in Intaglios, passim.
Early life and education Robert Kipniss was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York, to Simeon and Stella Kipniss, both of whom worked in Manhattan, New York. 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, was born in 1936. The family moved to Laurelton, Queens, 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."Chronology, in Intaglios, passim, 168. D. A. [Dore Ashton], Art Digest, 26, no.1 (1 October 1951). In 1953 the Harry Salpeter Gallery, also on 57th Street, gave him his second one-man show.Chronology, in Intaglios, 169.
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.Chronology, in Intaglios, 169–71.
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.For chronologies on Kipniss's major museum and other institutional exhibitions, see the accompanying lists and Intaglios, 179–83; Piersol, 103–06; Paintings, 144–48. 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.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-orleans-museum-to-re- open-with-a-salute-to-the-arts-55233227.html. Bullard, Foreword, in Paintings, ix–x. In 1980 a large solo show of paintings and prints took place at La Tertulia Museum in Cali, Colombia.
Kipniss's work is held by more than eighty-eight museums and other institutions.See the list of collections holding Kipniss's works accompanying this article and Intalgios, 179–81; Piersol, 101–102; Paintings, 142–44. In 1982, John Caldwell of the New York Times noted that Kipniss "is represented in many of the most important museums in this country, and his record of one-man shows, which began in 1959 [sic, 1951] has of late turned into a veritable torrent of exhibitions."John Caldwell, "Kipniss Lends Vision to Realist School," New York Times, 10 Oct. 1982, 28. See also the lists of exhibitions. In the United States, he has shown his work and been represented at: Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco (1999–2014); Gerhard Wurzer Gallery, Houston, Texas (1981–2004); and Harmon-Meek Gallery, Naples, Florida (1976 through the present). In Manhattan, his work has appeared at and he has been represented by the Old Print Shop (1980s through the present); Beadleston Gallery (2000–2003); Hirschl & Adler Galleries (1976–81); FAR Gallery (1964–74); and the Contemporaries (1959–63). In London, he has shown at and been represented by the Redfern Gallery (1996 to the present).See the lists of gallery representations and exhibitions accompanying this article.
Influences In his 1982 New York Times review, cited above, Caldwell also observed that "the question of artistic influences is unusually complicated in the case of Mr. Kipniss" and that "the sense that one gets in all of [his] work is of a genuinely individual sensibility."Caldwell. Several writers on art have mentioned the work of Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, Hudson River School painters such as George Inness, and the Barbizon School painters, including Camille Corot, as having qualities similar to Kipniss's or as possible sources of inspiration for him.Piersol, on Asher B. Durand, 10, and on a kinship with George Inness and Mark Tobey, 12–13. Boyle, "Solitude and Silence," in Paintings, on a kinship with Casper David Friedrich, Tonalism, and Giorgio Morandi, 10–11.
Kipniss himself has indicated various locations as important sources of inspiration, especially on his scenes with houses. The locations include the streets and neighborhoods of Springfield, Ohio, which he sometimes sketched during his first two college years and revisited in 1979, taking photographs and sketching alleys and streets at twilight. He returned over the next twenty years to continue sketching. In 1999 Kipniss described how this location influenced his artistic development: "‘The elements that remain a large part of my imagery all my working life began to emerge in these sketches: mysterious windowless houses, backyard fences, trees leafless in the off-season. . . . My work remains unpopulated because I can then become as if the lone inhabitant, and when the work leaves my hands, who stands before it becomes for a moment me, alone, there.’"Boyle, "Solitude and Silence," in Paintings, 2, quoting Kipniss from the exhibition brochure, Harmon-Meek Gallery, 1999, n.p. For works depicting Springfield, Ohio, from other views and in other mediums, see Paintings, passim; Piersol, passim; Intaglios, passim; Kipniss, Artist's Life, pl. 22.
Other locations that inspired Kipniss were alleys in Columbus, Ohio, which he sketched in 1958.Robert Kipniss, Robert Kipniss: A Working Artist's Life (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 125. In 1989 he briefly visited Elsah, Illinois, a small town on the Mississippi River (since 1974 on the National Register of Historic Places) where the narrow streets and many limestone houses made an impression on him. He returned the next year to do sketches that became the basis of works in other mediums.Chronology, in Intaglios, 175. In 1993 the woods and fields of northwestern Connecticut provided inspiration for paintings and mezzotints.
Works
Paintings
Kipniss's early work consisted of abstractions, biomorphic forms, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and figures.Boyle, "Solitude and Silence," in Paintings, 5. Kipniss, "Comments by the Artist and Poet," in Paintings and Poetry, 8. The majority of these works were landscapes of subdued color, often with few details, and loosely brushed. Large Trees at Dusk (1962) was one of several paintings and drawings in 1961 and 1962 which introduced a boldness of form and a more pronounced moodiness.Boyle, "Solitude and Silence," in Paintings, 7–8, 13. Paintings and Poetry, images 56–58 and Price, "Ut Pictura Poesis," 16: "Kipniss made a breakthrough with a series of large drawings that were less restrained and more aggressively rendered than any of his previous work."
The paintings and prints that followed, executed either in black and white or in color, include numerous variations in the shape, size, and placement of trees. Large Trees at Dusk exhibits the beginning of Kipniss's purification of tree forms, his use of closely related hues in a subdued or dark range, and the sense of solitude characteristic of his mature output. Of the paintings and prints since 1962, hundreds show the interplay of tree trunks, focusing on close or more distance views.See the books cited in footnotes 1–5 for mature paintings and prints that follow Kipniss's seminal works.
In the review of a solo painting show in Manhattan in 1966, a Time magazine critic wrote: "In the twilight zone between recollection and imagination, a New York painter has found a vista of mind and mood that he calls ‘the Inner Landscape.’ With hushed tones, feathered brushing and eerie chiaroscuro, he invests his scenes with the appearance of reality and the ambiance of dream.""Art in New York," Time.