Background
Kauffman was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, on March 31, 1932. He was the son of Kurtz Kauffman and Pansy Margaret Buchanan Kauffman.
1750 Yosemite Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA
Craig Kauffman was a student of Eagle Rock High School from 1946 to 1950.
850 Bloom Walk, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Kauffman entered the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles in 1950 and completed his studies there in 1952.
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Craig Kauffman became a student of the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Art, in 1952, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the university in 1955 and Master of Arts degree in 1956.
1967
Portrait of Craig Kauffman with Untitled Wall Reliefs.
1976
Paris, France
Craig Kauffman in Paris studio working.
Craig Kauffman with a work using translucent plastic sheets.
Craig Kauffman posing in front of his artwork.
1955
Craig Kauffman. Photo by Ed Moses.
1967
Portrait of Craig Kauffman with Untitled Wall Reliefs.
1976
Paris, France
Craig Kauffman in Paris studio working.
1750 Yosemite Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA
Craig Kauffman was a student of Eagle Rock High School from 1946 to 1950.
850 Bloom Walk, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Kauffman entered the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles in 1950 and completed his studies there in 1952.
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Craig Kauffman became a student of the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Art, in 1952, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the university in 1955 and Master of Arts degree in 1956.
Craig Kauffman with a work using translucent plastic sheets.
Craig Kauffman posing in front of his artwork.
Kauffman was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, on March 31, 1932. He was the son of Kurtz Kauffman and Pansy Margaret Buchanan Kauffman.
Craig Kauffman enrolled in Eagle Rock High School in 1946. There he studied together with his childhood friend, Walter Hopps, who later became a museum director and curator of contemporary art. In spring 1950 he graduated from the School and entered the University of Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles.
In 1952 Kauffman transferred from the University of Southern California to the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Art. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the university in 1955 and enrolled in his graduate program. The following year he earned his Master of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kauffman exhibited his paintings at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles for the first time in 1951. It was a group show, during which he sold one of his artworks. In 1953 he held his first solo exhibition, at the Landau Galleries; it was favourably reviewed for Art News magazine by art critic Jules Langsner.
In 1954 Shirley Neilsen, Walter Hopps, Ben and Betty Bartosh, Michael Scoles and Kauffman established Syndell Studio in Brentwood, where Craig Kauffman exhibited paintings in informal art shows. He also used this space as his studio. The following year, along with Walter Hopps and Jim Newman, Kauffman organized Action 1, an exhibition presented at the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica Pier.
Craig Kauffman moved to New York City in 1956, where he lived for three months. There he became a regular at the Cedar Street Tavern, where he met Milton Resnick and Franz Kline, American abstract painters. He then spent six months in Europe, living in Paris, South France, and England. While in Paris, he took French classes at the Alliance Française and met such artists as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell.
The artist returned to the United States and settled in San Francisco in 1957. He befriended other San Francisco artists, including Robert Morris. However, he moved back to Los Angeles in four months. There he rented a studio west of Sawtelle Boulevard in Los Angeles, which he shared with Ed Moses. Nine months later Moses left, and Robert Irwin moved in to share the space.
Kauffman had his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1958; it was entitled Paintings and Drawings. Craig Kauffman described these artworks as coming from "funny combinations of influences: I mean Mondrian and Duchamp and dada and biomorphism and abstract expressionism all at once." He then went to San Francisco where he shared an apartment with Jim Newman in the Pacific Heights neighbourhood. Among his friends and colleagues, there were Wally Hedrick, Sonia Gechtoff, James Kelly, Jay DeFeo, and Michael McClure. The same year he exhibited in his first one-man show at Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, California.
From 1960 he lived in Copenhagen and Paris. That same year he also travelled to Ibiza. In Paris, he stayed in an apartment near the renowned Beat Hotel. While abroad, the artist got acquainted with the abstract artists Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, as well as Darthea Speyer, who would later become his Paris dealer. Around this time he had his second solo show at Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, California.
After two years abroad, Kauffman returned to the United States in 1962. He viewed Billy Al Bengston’s airbrushed paintings, including his motorcycle logo works, at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and also took inspiration from the erotic shapes found in Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues. Bengston taught him how to use a compressor and a spray gun. As a result, Craig Kauffman began to apply paint in thin, spray-painted layers.
In 1963 Kauffman held his second solo show at the Ferus Gallery. Besides, The Ferus Gallery included Kauffman's artworks in a collective exhibition titled Altoon, Bell, Bengston, DeFeo, Irwin, Kauffman, Lobdell, Mason, Moses, Price, Ruben, Ruscha. The same year he attended the opening ceremony of the first retrospective of Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum, which was organized by Walter Hopps.
In order to learn how to design and fabricate vacuum-moulded plastic works, Craig Kauffman sought the help of technicians at Planet Plastics in Paramount in 1964. He painted the low-relief wall pieces using a spray gun and air compressor to achieve intense, translucent colours. The following year he displayed his most recent series in an individual show at the Ferus Gallery. Arnold Glimcher, an American art dealer of Pace Gallery in New York, attended this show and invited Kauffman to join a group show called 5 at Pace.
The Robert Fraser Gallery, London, featured Craig Kauffman in his first collective show in Europe in 1966; the exhibit was titled Los Angeles Now. Later the Los Angeles County Museum of Art purchased his work titled Yellow-Orange (1965) using Contemporary Art Council funds.
1967 was the year when the artist held his first solo show in New York, titled Recent Work, at Pace Gallery; he also took part in his first national group exhibition, Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture 1967, at the Krannert Art Museum, the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. Then his works were included in the group exhibition A New Aesthetic at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.
Craig Kauffman's art pieces were presented during the Cinquième Biennale de Paris, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, with works by John McCracken, Lyn Foulkes, and Ed Ruscha. The show then travelled to the Pasadena Art Museum. In 1967 Kauffman started his teaching career at the University of California, Irvine, where he worked as a lecturer. Eventually, he accepted tenure and held the post of a professor for 35 years there.
He spent the summer of 1967 in Berkeley, California to teach the summer session at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, he began his work on a series of horizontal, oval wall pieces spray-painted with iridescent colours. The artist moved back to Los Angeles in the fall. In 1969 Kauffman's art pieces were included in Kompas 4 Westcoast USA, at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, the show was organized by Jan Leering, and in 1970 his solo museum show took place at the Pasadena Art Museum. He then moved to New York City. During his stay in New York, Kauffman taught at the School of Visual Arts and spent much of his time with Robert Morris.
In the year 1972 Kauffman started a series of paintings with exposed wood, stretched canvas, and muslin. In a year he displayed his works at Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris, France and later at Pace Gallery, titled New Work. In 1974 he also exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in 1976 at Galerie Darthea Speyer and at Robert Elkon Gallery, New York.
Around 1977, after his return from France, he began to create his paintings on synthetic silk. Later on, he spent three weeks travelling in Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, and Singapore. In 1979 Kauffman settled in New York, into a loft space on Bond Street in Soho. In 1983 the artist visited Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was highly inspired by the examples of the Shakers’ hand-made furniture, and it made its way into his paintings.
Craig Kauffman travelled to Asheville, North Carolina, in 1984. He visited his friend Allen Lynch, who was a Zen master. Lynch was an owner of a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese ceramics, which Kauffman admired. His artworks of 1984 and 1985 comprised of images of tea bowls and trays of sushi which were highly stylized. In 1986 Kauffman started his extended tour throughout Asia, visiting Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. At this time he began his work on a new series of paintings on silk.
Kauffman produced a small series of new works in plastic in 1990. That year Los Angeles curator Noriko Fujinami presented Kauffman's works in the group show Abstractions, 5 Artists at the Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan. He retired from teaching at the University of California, Irvine, and moved for a brief period of time to the Philippines in 1994.
His later exhibitions were held at the Patricia Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, California, in 1995; the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California, both in 1997; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, in 2004; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2006; the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, in 2008. His last exhibition took place at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, in 2010.
Craig Kauffman is considered one of the most ingenious American artists of the postwar period. He is often cited as a prolific figure in the Los Angeles art world during the 1950s and 1960s.
After his death, there were organized numerous retrospective exhibitions to commemorate his achievements. Kauffman’s works were displayed in five group exhibitions that were part of the Getty Research Institute’s "Pacific Standard Time" initiative. Among them were: "46 N. Los Robles: A History of the Pasadena Art Museum" at the Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, California; "Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1945-1963", at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California; "Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971", at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California; and so on.
In 2012 the Estate of Craig Kauffman, in cooperation with the Frank Lloyd Gallery, published "Sensual Mechanical: The Art of Craig Kauffman". This book was written by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and it was the first comprehensive monograph on the life and work of Craig Kauffman.
Today Kauffman's primarily abstract paintings and wall relief sculptures are displayed in over 20 museum collections, including the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In a 2008 video interview in conjunction with a show at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, Craig Kauffman said that the famous lingerie shop Frederick’s of Hollywood provided his artistic nurture. He also confessed to having a "shoe fetish", that had influenced some of his art.
Quotes from others about the person
Susan C. Larsen: "Kauffman's work has maintained its radiant colour and its emphasis on certain sensuous physical properties of his materials."
Susan L. Jenkins: "... his [Kauffman's] works, as well as others associated with the L.A. Look, can nevertheless be thought of as possessing a relatively Minimalist sensibility. Like Judd's 'specific objects', Kauffman's vacuum-formed plastic works exist in a space between painting and sculpture."
Richard Armstrong: "The true power of what he [Kauffman] did was his incorporation and then redirection of light inside sculpture."
Kauffman was married several times. Dana Kauffman was one of his wives. The couple gave birth to three daughters: Wilhelmina, Vida Rose and Georgia Kauffman. Craig and Dana then separated.
Walter Hopps (1932-2005) was an American museum director and curator of contemporary art.
Robert Morris (1931-2018) was an American sculptor, conceptual artist as well as writer. He was one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism and he also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement, and installation art.
Mary Joan Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was an American painter, sculptor, and jewellery maker associated with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
Robert W. Irwin (born in 1928) is an American installation artist. He was associated with the art movement of Light and Space.
