Robert Kipniss: Drawn to the Art of Trees
As September draws to a close the trees are losing their leaves and our landscape is changing. Trees permeate every view at my house and I love experiencing the passing of the seasons through their transitions. The darker evenings perhaps turn me to more introspective art, and today in particular the work of American painter and printmaker Robert Kipniss caught my eye.
Kipniss was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1931 and grew up in an artistic household. He was already drawing and painting as a child and, at 16, attended classes at the Art Students League of New York. But it wasn't only visual art that interested him. He began writing poetry in 1948, studied literature at Wittenberg College and then the University of Iowa, graduating with a degree in English before completing his MFA in 1954.
Remarkably, his first solo exhibition in New York came in 1951 while he was still a student. Painting and writing continued alongside each other for more than a decade.
I find the relationship between the two particularly interesting. Kipniss has described his early paintings as lyrical and full of colour, while the poetry he was writing at the same time was much darker. When he stopped writing poetry in the 1960s to concentrate on painting, some of that darkness seems to have moved across into his art. The muted palette, weighty shadows and slightly dreamlike atmosphere that now feel so characteristic of his work began to emerge.
Printmaking came later. Kipniss began making prints in 1967 at the Pratt Center for Graphics, first working with intaglio techniques before developing an affinity for lithography the following year. He produced hundreds of lithographs before increasingly turning to mezzotint, a process particularly suited to the deep blacks, soft light and subtle changes of tone that suit his work so beautifully.
His paintings and prints return again and again to familiar subjects: bare trees, quiet landscapes, softened buildings, windows, interiors and still lifes. Twilight and dawn seem to suit them. There is often just enough light to reveal a shape, while leaving something hidden.
You might think returning to such a small vocabulary of subjects would become repetitive, but I find the opposite. A tree shifts with its surroundings, the time of day, the season and the light. Kipniss seems less interested in recording a particular place than in the feeling a place can leave behind.
That quiet approach has travelled a long way. Kipniss has exhibited since 1951 and his work is held in major collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Colour is rarely indulged, although it does occasionally appear in a beautifully restrained way. It is those dark shadows and considered marks that capture nature's movement so succinctly for me. His prints in particular seem to make an enormous range of feeling from almost nothing but black, white and every shade in between.
Kipniss retired from painting in 2018 but continued drawing and making intaglio prints, finally retiring from printmaking in 2024. His long career produced more than 750 print editions as well as decades of paintings and drawings.
Maybe it's just the grey day outside my window, but I am drawn to the noir aspect of Kipniss' work today, appreciating the story it wants to tell. There is a solitude to it, but I don't find it lonely. More a moment when the world has gone quiet enough for you to notice it.
You can explore much more of his work and career at Robert Kipniss Studio, or read about his papers and career at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
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