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Kaprow (Allan) Papers
980063
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Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Allan Kaprow papers
Creator: Baecker, Inge
Creator: Conz, Francesco, 1935-
Creator: Donguy, Jacques
Creator: Fluxus (Group of Artists)
Creator: Vostell, Wolf, 1932-1998
Creator: Schimmel, Paul
Creator: Schapiro, Meyer, 1904-1996
Creator: Samaras, Lucas, 1936-
Creator: Pollock, Jackson, 1912-1956
Creator: Oldenburg, Claes, 1929-
Creator: Moore, Peter, 1932-1993
Creator: Mondrian, Piet, 1872-1944
Creator: McElroy, Robert R.
Creator: Knížák, Milan
Creator: Kaprow, Allan
Creator: Kantor, Tadeusz, 1915-1990
Creator: Hofmann, Hans, 1880-1966
Creator: Higgins, Dick, 1938-1998
Creator: Hansa Gallery (New York, N.Y.)
Identifier/Call Number: 980063
Physical Description: 63.5 Linear Feet(119 boxes, 16 flat file folders, 2 rolls)
Date (inclusive): 1940-1997
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.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
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Language of Material: English.
Scope and Content of Collection
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. These files form the core of the collection and demonstrate the evolution of Kaprow's Happening
from a relatively scripted, grand, social event (Chicken; Household) to an austere, inter-subjective experience (Time Pieces;
Rates of Exchange). They contain the artist's notes and drafts of the casually poetic scores, along with correspondence and
photo-documentation by Peter Moore, Robert McElroy, and Julian Wasser, among other photographers. A variety of Printed Matter,
including Scrapbooks, Clippings and Posters, document the work's presentation and reception in the art world. There are also
Film, Video and Audio recordings of many Happenings and Activities. Kaprow's writings, arranged chronologically by year, represent
the artist's consistent production of articles, essays, books, and lectures about the practice of contemporary art and issues
in art education. Teaching files contain correspondence with university officials and colleagues; together with Professional
Correspondence they portray the financial difficulties attendant on an unconventional art career that has taken place outside
the usual venues and generated few objects that could be sold for profit. Artists' Files comprise texts, objects or photographs
sent to Kaprow, and evoke the international community of avant-garde artists to which Kaprow belongs.
The papers are organized in 10 series:Series I. Education, 1940-1996; Series II. Hansa Gallery, 1953-1958; Series III. Project
Files, 1946-1999; Series IV. Printed Matter, 1952-1997; Series V. Writings, 1953-1997; Series VI. Teaching Files, 1952-1993;
Series VII. Professional Correspondence, 1946-1998; Series VIII. Artists' Files, 1955-1996; Series IX. Personal, 1946-1996;
Series X. Films and Video and Audio Tapes, 1957-1995; Oversize from Series I-X, 1949-1970.
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 works several times,
making a total of nearly 250 pieces. His influence on other artists, especially the performance and installation artists of
the 1970s and 1980s, has been significant. More than forty years after the first Happening, his work is the subject of continual
critical discussion. While the form Kaprow largely invented has lost its shock-value, the quality of his ephemeral pieces
continues to resonate through their scores and other surviving documentation.
435 monographs and serials were transferred to the library 1999 Apr 20.
Peter Kirby created an inventory and reformatted audio cassettes, Super 8 films, video tapes and 1/4 inch audio tapes in 2003.
The remainder of audio visual materials were reformatted between 2004 and 2008 by the Getty Research Library. In 2018 graduate
intern Jacob Zaborowski added content from audio visual physical use copies to the digital preservation system.
Two letters from Kaprow to his family in 1947 were donated by Coryl Crane-Kaprow / Kaprow Estate in 2017 and integrated into
the collection in 2022.
Many audiovisual items have been reformatted. Some are available in the repository as DVD use copies, as indicated in the
container list; others have been digitized and are available online to on-site Readers and Getty staff:
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/980063s10
Collection acquired from Allan Kaprow in 1998.Gift of Coryl Crane-Kaprow / Kaprow Estate: Two letters from Kaprow to family
in 1947.
Allan Kaprow Papers, 1940-1997, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 980063.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa980063
Open for use by qualified researchers. Audiovisual materials unavailable until reformatted.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Scores
Scrapbooks
Photographic prints
Art -- Study and teaching
Motion pictures (visual works)
Posters
Photographs, Original
Performance art
Happening (Art)
Audiotapes
Theater
Videotapes
Conceptual Art
Arts, Modern-20th century