Robert Kipniss
ROBERT KIPNISS (B.1931)
Robert Kipniss, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City in 1931. 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, and an MFA in painting and art history in 1954.
Kipniss began his career as a painter, enjoying his initial New York solo exhibition in 1951. He produced his first print in 1967 at the urging of Murray Roth, his dealer at the time. After first producing etchings and drypoints from copper plates, Kipniss switched to lithography and began a two decade collaboration with the master printer Burr Miller. Following this period, Kipniss turned his efforts to mezzotints.
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 essentially monochromatic, stylized vistas with natural and architectural elements. The artist has eloquently stated that the “central impetus of my work is the endless range of feelings and thoughts evoked by the basic act of seeing, usually in isolation, and with a haunting intensity.”
In his career, Robert Kipniss has had over 200 One-man Shows since the first in New York in 1951. Recent Group Shows include; the Royal Academy, London, Royal Academy Summer Show, 2001, The British Museum, London, Recent Acquisitions, 2000 and the National Academy of Design, New York, Treasures Revealed: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Works on Paper, 1999. An exhibition of his work, Seen in Solitude: Robert Kipniss Prints from the James F. White Collection, was selected to reopen the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2006.
Robert Kipniss is represented in numerous public collections in the United States, South America and Europe including: The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Library of Congress, The British Museum, London, the National Academy of Design, New York, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London (diploma piece), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY.
He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1980, and to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London in 1998. In 2008, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of American Graphic Artists. He has also received the Speicher-Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as Honorary Doctorates from Wittenberg University and Illinois College.
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 Raisonné published on his work..