Richard Rappaport
| Richard Rappaport | |
|---|---|
 GG01 1994-The German Girl-No 1 and 2.jpg 1994 - The German Girl - Nos. 1 and 2 | |
| Born | 1944 (age 81–82) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| 🏳️ Nationality | American |
| 🏫 Education | Carnegie Mellon University, Brooklyn College |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Painting |
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Richard Rappaport (born 1944 in Pittsburgh) is a classically trained painter of portraits and large-scale figurative works whose pictorial evolution has spiraled towards and away from the Renaissance ideal for half a century.
A former student and friend of Robert L. Lepper at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Rappaport is one of the artists influenced by Lepper’s course “Individual and Social Analysis”. His 1989 paper “Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project”[1] is the principal source on Lepper’s influence on Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky when they were Lepper’s students.
Life and work
From early on, Rappaport showed unusual promise in drawing the human face, making emotionally credible portraits of family and friends from his eighth year on. The culminating work is the reverential drawing of his great-grandmother (1954), made soon after his tenth birthday. Then, for three years, starting in fifth grade, the young artist attended the Carnegie Institute's (now The Carnegie) Tam O'Shanter art class, which was followed at thirteen by a year of Saturday afternoons in traditional painting apprenticeship with the realist/surrealist artist Abe Weiner. Already an accomplished draftsman at seventeen, Rappaport was awarded the gold medal in drawing in the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in the spring of 1962 before entering the Department of Painting & Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.
The "Carnegie Tech" Years: Robert Lepper / Six Characters in Search
One of the most significant works that would inform this artist's future practice, made while on Christmas vacation his first year at "Carnegie Tech", is the four-foot-high Self Nude (scratchboard) (1962) of himself waist-high, highlighting a bare arm, shoulder, and half-face against the black background. It proves to be a watershed when, eight years later, the artist returns to the concept of scratchboard by adapting it to layers of oil paint on canvas in "grattage" works such as Joseph Accused (1971), in which the image is made by scratching through the smoothed, palette-knife-applied top layer of cadmium red to the lighter mid-color of turquoise and yellow-white base.
In August 1963, the summer following his freshman year, Rappaport painted his first suite of mature portraits, which included those of Mrs. Ress (1963), Ann Weiner (1963), and the standing three-quarter-length Self Nude (1963). Their straight-on depictions of character relate to the portraits of Alice Neel, of whom the artist was unaware at the time. This work won him the art department's Leisser Award for work done independently and afforded him the occasion of his first exhibition of these portraits lining its central hallway at the beginning of his sophomore year. His father, on seeing the show, gave him an account for art supplies, which made possible his painting large works on linen canvas for his remaining three years at school.
From then on, he was only nominally a student; choosing his themes independently and working outside of the classroom that sophomore year with his sights on Rembrandt and Titian while painting the first state of his mother's portrait Woman with Red Hands (1963) and Burial of Christ (1964). Its stark representation, an homage to the medieval Villeneuve-les-Avignons Pietà, is the first of a number of works made over the years where he portrays himself in the role of the alienated outsider.
These were followed in his junior year by the double-portrait of the actors Michael Tucker and Laurie Jefferson (1965) and his own partial Family Portrait (1965) that portrays only his mother, younger brother Ronald, and himself during the highly emotional period when his parents separated. Executed on rabbit-skin glue-sized but not primed linen canvas, the faces in both paintings are built up from the absorbent weave, owing much to the example of Edgar Degas -- especially that of the artist's mother to Degas' Portrait of a Young Woman (1867).
That summer of 1965, in Six Characters in Search (1965), the artist paints himself as the rebellious protagonist/target of ridicule and prosecutor of judgment, taking its cue from Michelangelo's Christ in the Last Judgment; and senior year Jewess Accused (1965), which shifts emphasis in the story of "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery" to express the ostracism and accusation of crimes levied against the Jews that led to the Holocaust. This was followed in his last semester by We Are All Somnambulists (1966). All of these were painted from live models.
However, Rappaport's work was out of phase with the dominant art movements emerging in the sixties: Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, and at odds with New Realism, whose program of objectivity in representing the human figure by eliminating all subjective response implying the spiritual dimension discredited the overt Romanticism in Rappaport's painting. Only Alice Neel and Larry Rivers in New York, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in England, and Balthus in France were privileged to paint figuratively with any response to an inner life given their subjects or any implied narrative. Consequently, Rappaport's practice was marginalized already as a student, and in these early works expressing universal themes of the human condition, his painting took on an autobiographical aspect.
Apart from painting, Rappaport was constantly drawing. His most evolved graphic series he did his sophomore year in a series of drawings, lithographs, and etchings executed directly from a theatrically lit display case at the Carnegie Museum of a naturally mummified skeletal figure buried in fetal position, which was already a fascination for the artist when a fifth grader at the museum's Tam-O'Shanter classes and to which, used as a symbolic motif of the Holocaust, the artist would return thirty-five years later in painting The Oven's Womb (1997), 119"x145", drawn in a simplified manner, as if cave painting, on a color field of cadmium red.
In the autumn of 1964, the following year, Rappaport took Lepper's The Oakland Project and Retrospective classes, entitled "Individual and Social Analysis", and soon formed a close bond with the older man. However, while Rappaport was fascinated by Lepper's logic and eloquence on a broad range of perceptual and communicative issues, his direction cannot be categorized with that of Lepper's famous former students: Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky, who, made conscious of changing hierarchies of value due to the impact of the machine and media on society, were directly influenced by Lepper's work in industrial design and Bauhaus leanings addressing the potential of technology's role in contemporary art practice, which, along with Lepper's conceptual paradigm: communication as intention expressed and followed logically, led to making art the focus for following human reason engaged in the perception of its own awareness -- a strategy seen in Bochner's Conceptual practice.
Rappaport, as much as he remained devoted to Lepper for the next twenty-five years, and all the while following the progression of Lepper's ideas in the evolution of the above-mentioned artists' work, consequently leading to his writing in 1989 "Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project", cannot be considered in Lepper's "camp". (This would be made more evident some seventeen years after Lepper's death in his essay Robert Lepper / Six Characters in Search that reviews Lepper's legacy four decades later.)
Instead, Rappaport kept to his own agenda, already evident in the Burial of Christ painted the year before meeting Lepper, which merged in expressive figurative painting the autobiographical with the socio-political, which were options in artistic direction laid out in Lepper's introduction to his classes, and exemplified the expressive force in what Lepper was pointing to in The Retrospective, whose primary goal, bracketed-off from the socio-political, evoked the emotive, psychic power of unmediated memory in response to autobiographical material.
Most importantly, Rappaport's departure in the late 1960s from traditional brush painting to his employing the grattage technique does owe a debt to Lepper's own example of arriving at the conclusion that the paintbrush was not his tool but that those of the industrial fabricator were. And in looking back to the great figurative tradition of Western art as a resource and inspiration, Rappaport was doing so informed by Lepper's late-modernist/postmodernist perspective and his injunction to allow for the unexpected by letting the process suggest where the work should go and not rush to expectations that set limitations on expression.
The autumn of 1964 proves to be an auspicious time when, soon after beginning Robert Lepper's class, Rappaport met Herbert A. Simon, one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, whose computer-simulated pioneer work in decision-making paralleled the communicative functions in Lepper's conceptual strategies. Following Rappaport's gift of a lithograph drawing of Simon's daughter Barbara, which initiated their acquaintance, Simon became an early supporter and longtime friend of the young artist, and whose portrait Herbert A Simon (1987) Rappaport painted in the summer of 1987 for Carnegie Mellon University as its first Nobel Prize laureate on the faculty, and which was followed a week later by Lepper's portrait.
Ship of Fools, July 1966
Upon graduation in June 1966, Rappaport was offered a loft space on West 74th Street, New York, for the summer where he painted his first work that was no longer dependent on live models but instead employed an expressively gestural execution in drawing the figures with large areas of washed-on color. Taking a cue from a photograph of Chagall painting his murals for Lincoln Center on the floor, as well as Japanese scroll painting in a book left by his benefactor which included an image of a typhoon-swept boat in the Mongol armada's failed invasion of Japan in the sixteenth century, Rappaport, with Hieronymus Bosch's version already in mind for its subject, began painting Ship of Fools (1966) within hours of the announcement of the United States' first bombing raids into North Vietnam, escalating the war.
Ship of Fools not only marks a major historical event; artistically, it marks a turning point from which the twenty-one-year-old artist entered into the beginning phase of a four-year evolution towards an iconographic figuration that in some works of 1970 came close to reducing traces of the figurative element almost entirely.
Rappaport's next major work in that evolution, the Oratory Mural (1966-1967), came as a result of exhibiting Ship of Fools at Skibo Hall at Carnegie Mellon University in November 1966, when Father Philip Walsh of the Pittsburgh Oratory commissioned Rappaport to paint a triptych for their proposed retreat house and arranged for the artist a studio space in the former chancellery behind St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh, where the artist painted the canvases on the floor in its Gothic library. The mural, declined, remained rolled for twenty years; whereupon, through the auspices of Michael A. Roosevelt, it found a home on extended loan to the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia, in 1987.
In working out the iconography on this fourteen-by-twenty-five-foot triptych, the artist became an admirer of the frescoes of Giotto; though only the "Escape through the Desert" on the left canvas of the Oratory Mural suggests openly that influence. And in general, in spite of the seriousness of the subject in Giotto's cycle on "The Life of Christ" in the Scrovegni Chapel, there is a playfulness in the pantomime that informs its celebratory mood that Rappaport responded to in his mural and that is expressed in the decorative, modernist function of the gessoed patterns playing in tandem with the figurative representation.
On a structural level, it is in works a few years later, however hidden his example, where Giotto's condensed compositions within the square that collapse the architectural space, or as in the cycle on St. Francis in Assisi, the mountainous canyons in which his figures find themselves, that became a source of inspiration for Rappaport's more abstracted figurative works contained in shallow relief as in Valley of the Kings (1969) and Asleep by the Tomb (1970).
Giotto, however, was not alone as an iconographic source for the mural. In Robert Campin's Annunciation (1427-1432), the round table that discreetly separates the angel Gabriel from Mary became for Rappaport's image the "circle of acceptance" upon which Mary is about to place her hand, and where Rappaport added above her head the face of another angel representing her consciousness of her son's future looking upwards to the Baptism, and from which evolved several years later into the surreal and abstracted motif of "courtship" in Providence in Motion (1969).
While working on the Oratory Mural, the artist, having graduated, nonetheless, was given for a short time the privileged use of the print room at Carnegie Tech. Transcribing onto a large, deeply-bit etching plate a linear adaptation of his mother's portrait Woman with Red Hands (1963-1966), the artist fashioned a severe icon of his mother which, when combined with the motif in the etching of Evelyn Ress, with the double view of her head, one dropping below the other as she falls asleep, became the prototype for a series of paintings that started with Mourning Clown (1967), that expressed the artist's sorrow over the death of his good friend Mrs. Ress, and The Work of Mourning (1968), that turned to the greater theme of the Holocaust, and which made a seamless progression into the works that evolved in France in the autumn of 1968.
The Paris Years: Iconic Abstractions, Joseph Accused
In September 1968, upon being awarded the Chaloner Prize through the Rome Prize competition, Rappaport began what would be an almost three-year sojourn in France; first living in Vincennes and the following year, through the auspices of Darthea Speyer, the American-in-Paris gallerist, was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts.
Two years later, in the autumn of 1970, while his solo exhibition of the more recent of these "iconic abstractions" was hanging at the Cité des Arts, Rappaport, upon reading Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers", began Joseph Accused (1970-1971), followed by Joseph in the Pit (1971) and Jacob in Mourning (1971), which were made in a scratchboard-like technique in which the drawn image was scratched through the dry surface layer of cadmium red into the base layers of turquoise and yellow-white on the canvas.
The New York Years, Portraits in Grattage, The Public Theatre Hangings
Throughout most of the 1970s, while simultaneously painting works that had evolved from the iconic abstractions of Paris, Rappaport made over twenty portraits in grattage, beginning with the double portrait of Jake and Esther Schwartz (1971) in Philadelphia while staying at his brother's on his return from France in the summer of 1971 for the sculptor Barbara Schwartz, the model for Potiphar's Wife in Joseph Accused; then, once in New York, Luke (1973), that would be shown along with works by Warhol and Philip Pearlstein in the New York City / Carnegie Mellon Alumni exhibition at Westbroadway Gallery in 1976, the tapestry-like devotional icon of the guru Baba Muktananda (1976-1977), and its technical twin: The White Sisters (1976-1979), that evolved through several metamorphoses, then finally scraped-down to a bare tint of color on the canvas threads leaving only the lyrical contours as an Art Nouveau tableau, finished just months before the artist's return to traditional brush painting with The Barren Womb (1979).
In 1974, at the home of Condé Nast publisher S.I. Newhouse Jr., Rappaport was introduced to Joseph Papp, the founding director of the New York Public Theater, who offered to hang the nine-foot-high Joseph in the Pit and Jacob in Mourning in the Public Theater's inner-lobby. They were installed that autumn of 1974 and remained there until the autumn of 1977.
Soon after their return, the artist reworked Joseph in the Pit, painting Joseph's hand red to stand for the painting of blood on the doorposts as a sign to warn away the Angel of Death in the Passover story of "Exodus", compounding it with the original story in "Genesis", and adding the huge face of a female apparition.[citation needed]
Two years later, Rappaport joined the cooperative Blue Mountain Gallery in New York, where he had five solo exhibitions through 1991.
The Return to Pittsburgh, A Visit to Paris: The German Girl
In 1985, he returned to Pittsburgh.[citation needed] Then, after a series of seven self-portraits made in the summer of 1986, a number of which were shown with Blue Madonna (1986) at Blue Mountain Gallery towards the end of that year; the following summer, upon being commissioned by Herbert Simon to paint his official portrait for Carnegie Mellon University, the artist also began a series of elders and former teachers which included that of Robert L. Lepper (1987), writing in 1989 Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project as a tribute to his former teacher.[citation needed]
A short three-month sojourn to Italy in late summer 1989 provided the artist the occasion to leave the expressionism of Buddha from the Cross (1989) and Red Ashen Skies (1989 / 2010), painting two works that restated in a more traditional manner standard Renaissance themes: the first, a baptism, later renamed Narcissus (1989 / 2007), painted in Florence in August and September and followed that October in the Sienna countryside with an Expulsion from the Garden (1989 / 1992). Both early states of these works were shown in the artist's last exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery in New York in late December 1990 into early January 1991.[citation needed]
After a romantic encounter in April 1994 while visiting friends in Paris, the artist returned to France that autumn, moving into a garden studio in Vincennes for ten months; there, painting in a rite of exorcism the self-portrait: The Performer (1994) as a counterpart to the series of single female nudes: The German Girl, which owed their eroticism to the example of Egon Schiele but without the latter's explicitness. An exhibition of these paintings was shown as "La noia alemanya nua" at Galeria Magdalena Baxeras in Barcelona in December 1995 following an introduction by the Cuban photographer Herman Puig, who, having photographed Rappaport in the Vincennes studio, had invited the artist to visit Barcelona.
Ashes in the Wind: The Work of Mourning: A Commemoration
Then, continuing painting in a similar manner, the artist, once back in Pittsburgh, changed themes, painting iconographic images of individual female figures symbolic of the victims of the Holocaust: Ashes in the Wind (1996), Madonna of the Flames (1996), Schneeloch (1996), Freeze (1996), The Chamber (1996), and Furnace Dancer (1997); and from there shifting to the motif of the skeletal figure buried in fetal position that the artist had drawn when a sophomore at Carnegie Tech and now drawn in a manner that suggested cave painting on very large canvases washed in cadmium red in The Oven's Womb (1997).
Then, following 9/11, in the December 2001 issue of Artforum, Rappaport placed on an ad page a photograph from 1966 with himself standing by Ship of Fools (1966).[citation needed]
In February 2005, within two weeks of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Rappaport exhibited the Holocaust images from 1996 and 1997 in Ashes in the Wind: The Work of Mourning at Garfield Artworks in Pittsburgh.[citation needed]
The artist continued this theme four years later in paintings suggesting crucifixions: To Leap into the Arms of the Eternal (2009), and Lightning on Sinai (2010), and in the striated washes of Storm Swept (2011).[citation needed]
Awards and Exhibitions
- 1962 - Scholastic Art & Writing Awards,[2] the National Gold Medal in Drawing.
- 1966 - Solo Exhibition at Skibo hall, Carnegie Mellon University.
- 1967 - Solo Exhibition of the "Oratory Mural" at Skibo hall, Carnegie Mellon University.
- 1967 - Solo Exhibition at the University of Chicago - Lexington Studio Gallery, Chicago.
- 1968 - The Chaloner Prize,[3] as a finalist in the American Academy in Rome Prize Competition.[4]
- 1969 - Group exhibition, "Jeunes artistes americans" at le Centre Cultural Americaine, Paris.[5]
- 1970 - Solo exhibition at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris.[6]
- 1974-1977 - Installation - "Joseph in the Pit", "Jacob in Mourning", the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York
- 1974 - Solo Exhibition - South Houston Gallery, SoHo, New York.
- 1976 - "Carnegie Mellon/NYC Alumni Show", West Broadway Gallery, SoHo, New York.
- 1982 - "29 Downing Street", New York City.[7]
- 1983, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991 - Solo exhibitions of paintings at the Blue Mountain Gallery, SoHo, New York City.[8]
- 1987 - Installation of the "Oratory Mural" on extended loan to the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia.[9]
- 1995 - Solo exhibition - "The German Girl Nude" ("La noia alemanya nua") at Magdalena Baxeras Galleria d'Arte, Barcelona
- 1997 - Group exhibition "Go Figure" at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston.
- 2005 - "Ashes in the Wind: The Work of Mourning", Garfield Artworks, Pittsburgh.[10]
- 2007 - Group exhibition, "Garden Show: In Full Bloom" Space Gallery, Pittsburgh.
- 2011 - "Rappaport Unblurred", International Children's Art Gallery, Pittsburgh.
References
- ↑ "Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project". Worldcat.org. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ "National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards". Artandwriting.org. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ "Chaloner Prize". Siris-archives.si.edu. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ "American Academy in Rome". Aarome.org. Archived from the original on 2012-04-06. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ Service Americane d'information et des relations culturelles, "Jeunes Artistes American", review of same, Informations & Documents, 15 October 1969: 20
- ↑ "Le Cite Internationale des Arts". Citedesartsparis.net. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ Judd Tully, "Richard Rappaport, 29 Downing St." review of same, Flash Art International, no. 108 (Summer 1982).
- ↑ "Blue Mountain Gallery". Blue Mountain Gallery. 2013-01-25. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ "iahp.org". iahp.org. Retrieved 2013-10-05.
- ↑ "Works of Mourning, review of same, The Jewish Chronicle 3 February 2005". Pittchron.com.
External links
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- Rappaport’s website, "Portraits & Passages," is his memoir illustrated by his works.
- Article in Pittsburgh City Paper, on exhibition at International Children's Art Gallery (July 21, 2011) - Venerable painter Richard Rappaport discusses five of his works.
- Article in Portuguese Wikipedia: "Pintura nos Estados Unidos", surveying painting in the United States from colonial times to the present, citing Rappaport's work along with that of two older artists as "good examples of the persistence of expressive figurative painting during its phase of ostracism and its recovery in the mid-1970s" and including reproductions of Jewess Accused (1965) and Self-Portrait (1986): "Philip Guston, Richard Rappaport e Chaim Goldberg sao bons exemplos da persistencia da pintura figurativa durante sua fase de ostracismo e de sua recuperacao em meados dos anos 1970."
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