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Kaprow (Allan) Papers
980063
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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 90049-1688
Business Number: (310) 440-7390
Fax Number: (310) 440-7780
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(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
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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.
Open for use by qualified researchers, except un-reformatted audiotapes, videotapes and
films.
Contact
Library Reproductions
and Permissions
.
Allan Kaprow Papers, 1940-1997, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no.
980063.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa980063
Collection acquired from Allan Kaprow in 1998. Gift of Coryl Crane-Kaprow / Kaprow Estate:
Two letters from Kaprow to family in 1947.
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 CD
and 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
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
Art -- Study and teaching
Performance art
Happening (Art)
Theater
Conceptual Art
Arts, Modern-20th century
Scores
Scrapbooks
Photographic prints
Motion pictures (visual works)
Posters
Photographs, Original
Audiotapes
Videotapes
Baecker,
Inge
Conz, Francesco,
1935-
Donguy,
Jacques
Fluxus (Group of Artists)
Vostell, Wolf,
1932-1998
Schimmel, Paul
Schapiro, Meyer,
1904-1996
Samaras, Lucas,
1936-
Pollock, Jackson,
1912-1956
Oldenburg, Claes,
1929-
Moore, Peter,
1932-1993
Mondrian, Piet,
1872-1944
McElroy, Robert
R.
Knížák, Milan
Kaprow,
Allan
Kantor, Tadeusz,
1915-1990
Hofmann, Hans,
1880-1966
Higgins, Dick,
1938-1998
Hansa Gallery (New York, N.Y.)