Saturday, April 08, 2006
Allan Kaprow
The artist Allen Kaprow died today at age 79. He was a pretty neat guy, one of the group of young artists in NYC in the fifties who took Cage's class at the New School and went on to bring the art world into the sixties; he more or less invented Happenings as we now know and love them. (I'm not quite sure why the Times obituary thinks he was influenced by abstract expressionism, as he strikes me as the furthest thing from it.) His book Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life is a lovely read, if you have never experienced his art before--lots of small, simple, and wise thoughts.
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I'm guessing it's because the Times writers don't actually know anything about art, and figured it'd be a safe bet that a prominent twentieth-century artist was influenced by abstract expressionism.
One of Kaprow's major ideas was to abstract the painting from action painting and bring the action to the point where it blurred with life; He published this idea in an article titled "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock". He was also a student of Hans Hofmann, a notable Abstract Expressionist.
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