Robert Kipniss
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.
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.
The family moved to Laurelton, Long Island, that year and to Forest Hills, Queens, New York, in 1941.
[11] 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.
[19] In 1989 he briefly visited Elsah, Illinois, a small town on the Missouri River (since 1974 on the National Register of Historic Places) where the narrow streets and many limestone houses made an impression on him.
[20] Kipniss's early work consisted of abstractions, biomorphic forms, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and figures.
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.
Of the paintings and prints since 1962, hundreds show the interplay of tree trunks, focusing on close or more distance views.
Many paintings of this type, which occasionally have one or more generic houses, display his use of closely related tones, a strong accent on the purity of form, refined silhouetting, and pronounced luminosity.
[30] By 1994 Kipniss had completed about 450 editions of lithographs, usually of 90 to 250 impressions, at the Burr Miller studio in Manhattan.
He added: "Kipniss enhances the remarkable purity and elegance of line in these lithographs by his restrained use of color.
Unlike many makers of mezzotints, he prefers using a burnisher rather than a scraper for reducing the depth of the holes, a process that controls the amount of ink held on the plate.
The burnisher allows him freer motion and a greater range of pressure, as a pencil would, giving him the ability to create an image that looks drawn rather than machine crafted.
Over time, Kipniss sought "narrower ranges of middle tones" while still bringing out the richness and resonance of darks characteristic of mezzotints.
The characteristics that became increasingly prominent in his mature work, his concern with capturing the essence of form and with even more subtle light effects, are clearly apparent.
[41] Window w/vase & forest (2000)[42] is representative of still lifes that show a vase of plant cuttings, most often of stems with leaves.
[46] "Almost all of his drypoints have the large areas of white typical of that medium, creating much more of an effect of outdoor light than his mezzotints.
The book compares the mood and content of his poetry with his transitional and early mature paintings and prints.
For Poems of Rainer Marie Rilke (1981), he created ten black and white lithographs which were reproduced in an edition of two thousand books.
[53] Comparing the lithographs with the poems, American poet Robin Magowan has written: "Both Kipniss and Rilke are exponents of inwardness, creating meditative enigmas to which we can keep returning without piercing their mysteries.
The works share a silence that carries something of an ascetic, a purging of excess and an attendant appreciation of a restraint that goes far beyond mere poetic concision.
Giving in to the spell cast by this highly wrought silence, we find ourselves waking to realities normally hidden—even to what might be called the unknown, the abiding mystery of existence.
