Finding a Sylvan and Secret World

Recently the Morgan Library announced acquisition of two graphite-on-paper works by Robert Kipniss, the superb printmaker and painter who spends weekends in the Northwest Corner. A show of his work at the White Gallery last fall was a highlight of 2009, and I was captivated by the mystery and emotion of the pieces.

Face to face, Kipniss is as controlled as his work: careful and sure in his answers, helpful but spare in his explanation of process, quietly elegant and emotional in describing his artistic "odyssey." He was born in Brooklyn (Kipniss is nearing the end of his eighth decade), but soon his family moved to Long Island and he grew up surrounded by trees, forests, paths and streams. A solitary child by choice, this sylvan world gave him comfort, strength, fed his imagination and sense of self-sufficiency, allowed him to be the single inhabitant of a secret world.

As he continued to explore, he moved beyond the Long Island woods and the woods surrounding his next home in Forest Hills, Queens. At college in Ohio, he walked the streets and alleys — usually at night — and sketched later from memory. Slowly the elements that informed his best known work emerged: windowless houses, fences, leafed and leafless trees, geometric shapes. His art grew more reductive, more about the forms and settings and a concentrated, distilled solitude.

Kipniss wanted to be a poet, and until the 1960s he both wrote and painted, with two one-man shows in New York City in the early ’50s. But then he reached a crossroads, had to make a choice, concentrate on one art form or the other. He chose to paint and, eventually, to create the wonderful prints that have made him famous.

For an artist, his work is his livelihood and "art" is a business. Kipniss is a consistently hard worker. He creates 30-35 paintings a year at a studio in Westchester and about 12 mezzotints at his house in Sharon. These are painstakingly made on mechanically "roughed" metal plates from Japan. Using a single burnishing tool, Kipniss smooths or reduces or leaves the rough surface, which then inks the sheet of paper uniquely in the printing process. Kipniss’s mastery of printmaking won him a lifetime achievement award from the Society of American Graphic Artists in 2007.

He is not a plein-air artist, but he does frequently work outdoors, and often these sketches become finished prints or paintings. Asked about differences between his chosen forms, Kipniss says, "Paintings are free; you go where each takes you. But you must know what you want when you begin a print and control the process."

This artist has worked with many galleries, some interested in developing his career, some more interested in sales. Both are necessary, he says. The last year-and-a-half has been "difficult," he knows, for most artists, but some still have a surprisingly big success measured in critical response and sales, as he did in San Francisco last autumn.

And before that, Kipniss’s work reopened the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2006, six months after Hurricane Katrina. That large, one-man show — 86 prints and 35 paintings — was seen by more than 6,500 viewers on the first weekend alone.

But, of course, Kipniss was a perfect choice for New Orleans. His obvious love of nature but recognition of its mysterious, sometimes ominous qualities, his non-religious but deeply spiritual moods, his sense of the isolation of each individual in nature: these were right for the time and the place.