inventory of the allan kaprow papers, 1940-1997 - Calisphere

Descriptive Summary
Title: Allan Kaprow papers
Date (inclusive): 1940-1997
Number: 980063
Creator/Collector: Kaprow, Allan
Physical Description: 63.5 linear feet(119 boxes, 16 flat file folders, 2 rolls)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, California, 90049-1688
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: The Allan Kaprow Papers offer comprehensive documentation of an artistic career that spanned the latter half of
the 20th century and continues into the 21st. Arranged chronologically so as to demonstrate the artist's passage from
student of art and art history to practicing artist, art theorist and art educator, the collection contains drawings, term
papers and notebooks from Kaprow's student days, followed by ca. 250 Project Files, comprising the complete extant
documentation of Kaprow's Environments, Happenings, and Activities.
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Language: Collection material is in English
Biographical / Historical Note
Allan Kaprow was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on August 23, 1927, and spent his childhood in Tuscon, Arizona. His
family then moved to New York, where Kaprow attended the High School of Music and Art, graduating in 1945. He received
his B.A. degree from New York University, where he majored in philosophy and art history and was a principle cartoonist for
the college magazine. He then earned a Master's Degree in art history at Columbia University where he studied with Meyer
Schapiro, to whom he dedicated his Thesis on Piet Mondrian in 1951. He also studied painting with Hans Hofmann
(1947-1948) at Hofmann's school, and musical composition with John Cage at the New School for Social Research
(1957-1958).
In the mid-1950s Kaprow began exhibiting his work, expressionist or fauvist-style paintings, at the Hansa Gallery, an East
Village cooperative that he co-founded with a group of other young artists including Jan Müller, Felix Pasilis, and Jean
Follett. By 1958, Kaprow's paintings had evolved into the interactive installations that he called Environments, at that time
a novel concept in the American art scene. From this Kaprow moved to the notion of creating an event determined, like
Cage's music, by a score that allowed for chance developments. The elements of these event pieces were always to be
everyday objects (tires, cheap mirrors, aluminum foil, plastic strips), people (participants), and often sound (bits of
household or workworld dialogue, breathing, industrial noise). He also generally dispensed with the gallery space and
utilized urban spaces or sites in nature.
Kaprow had a long career as a professor of art and art history. He taught at Rutgers University (1953-1961), SUNY Stony
Brook (1961-1968), California Institute of the Arts (1969-1974) and UC San Diego (1974-1993), and has been a visiting
lecturer at numerous museums and universities. He also co-directed an educational program for the Berkeley public
schools in 1969, Project Other Ways, and has authored several proposals regarding art education reform in the United
States.
Beginning with his prescient article "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," published in Art News in 1958, Kaprow has consistently
produced critical and theoretical pieces that explain his kind of art as the most adequate aesthetic response to
contemporary life. Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (1966) presented the work of like-minded artists through
both photographs and critical essays, and is a standard text in the field of performance art. Kaprow's Essays on the Blurring
of Art and Life (1993), a collection of pieces written over four decades, has made his theories about the practice of art in
the present day available to a new generation of artists and critics. In addition, major catalogs of Kaprow's work have been
published in connection with retrospectives in the U.S. and Europe, most notably 7 Environments (1992).
The critical and public acceptance of Kaprow's work may be attributed as much to the polemics of Kaprow's writings and
lectures as to his anticipation that American art would move away from the hermetic aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism
and return, in certain respects, to the anti-subjective populism of Futurism, Constructivism and Dada. For four decades
Kaprow has continued to work within the form of the Environment, Happening, or Activity, and has reinvented certain early
INVENTORY OF THE ALLAN
KAPROW PAPERS, 1940-1997
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