Robert Kipniss - ''At first light'' 1991 (Mezzotint) - Sold

• About the Artist:
  Artist statement:
  
  “ I have learned one thing miraculously: the greatest reward for making art is making art. ''
  
  “I knew instinctively that painting and exhibiting were the only necessities I needed, and whatever difficulties I encountered in my path, there was always the reassurance of working and learning.
  I worked and exhibited from the beginning, and it never occurred to me to question whether I would be successful or not. It was very challenging in the beginning, mainly because there was no sure way to do it, no rules, no signposts.
  For about ten years my painting was lyrical, energetic, filled with bright colors, and charged with exuberance. At the same time, the poetry I wrote was dark, angry, and often painful to write.
  
  "When I stopped writing in the early 1960s, my paintings took on the characteristics of my poetry and became imbued with anger, a dark monochromatic palette, seriousness and sometimes slightly surrealistic themes."
  
  ''It was only after a few years that my lyricism started to resurface and merge with the darkness. This was the beginning of my mature style. The life of an artist is about art. I have lived my life as I dreamed of it as a young man.”

• Career:
  Kipniss was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the Art Students League in 1947, from 1948 to 1950 at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and at the University of Iowa, where he earned a BA in English Literature in 1952 and an MFA in Painting and Art History in 1954. achieved.
  
  Kipniss, one of the most accomplished living American printmakers, worked in stone lithography during his early career, then mainly in mezzotint since the early 1990s. He is considered a true master of the delicate interplay between dark and light of this technique.
  
  The artist has painted a lot in oil throughout his life. As in his prints, his subject is the natural world, especially shady landscapes with trees, shrubs, houses and hills. The atmosphere is often one of silence, solitude, intensity and mystery. Over the years his palette has become one of mostly muted grays and greens and the soft light of twilight and darkness.
  
  In the United States, the artist's work is included in the collections of many important museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
  
  Worldwide, his work can be found in the prestigious British Museum and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in London, the Albertina in Vienna, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

• Works in selected public collections:

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. CAAlbertina Museum, Vienna, Austria Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME
National Library of France, Paris
The British Museum, London
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ
University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN
Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MI
Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY
Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Pinakothek der Moderne, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England
Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO
Syracuse University Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

• Source: https://www.robertkipniss.net