Lawrence Kupferman was born March 25, 1900 in Dorchester, MA, the son of cigar maker Samuel Kupferman and Rose. He studied at the Boston Museum School with Philip Leslie Hale and H. Alden Ripley (1929-1931); Massachusetts School of Art with Ernest L. Majors and Otis Philbrick (1931-1935). From 1947-1949 he had a Provincetown studio to which Pollock, Gottlieb, Byron Brown, Rothko and others would discuss art and painting and he exhibited with those men at Forum 49 at the Provincetown Art Association in 1948. During the 40s and 50s Kupferman was a leading edge abstract painter and his microscopic paintings were often rave-reviewed in the N.Y. Times.

Kupferman was a member of the Society of American Etchers; an Associate at the National Academy; Philadelphia Water Color Club. Awards include American Artists for Victory (1942); San Francisco Art Association (1938); Society of American Etchers (1939). One-man shows include Mortimer Brandt Gallery (1946); Boris Mirski Gallery, Boston (1944-1946); Mortimer Leavitt Gallery, NY (1948, 1949, 1951, 1953); Martha Jackson Gallery (1955); Swetzoff Gallery, Boston (1956); Ruth White Gallery, NY (1958); Gropper Gallery, NY (1958); Pace Gallery, Boston (1950,1961,1963); DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (1961); Galerie Irla Kert, Montreal (1962); Art Unlimited, Prov., RI (1963); Tragos Gallery, Boston (1965); Horizon Gallery, Rockport (1968); Greenfield Gallery, NY (1970); Horizon West, L.A., CA (1971); Harold Ernst Gallery, Boston (1973);retrospective, Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA (1976).He is represented in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Boston Public Library; Fuller Memorial Art Museum, Brockton, MA; Mills College; Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Institute; IBM Collection; Baltimore Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Bowdoin College; N.Y. University; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; Harvard University; Addison Gallery of American Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, MA and many more museums. Position: Teacher at the Mass. School of Art (1941-1970). He died at University Hospital in Boston of Parkinson’s disease and complications of pneumonia on October 2, 1982. Married artist Ruth Cobb April 29, 1937. Two children, both artists: Nancy and David.

References: Critic Howard Devree wrote in The New York Times, “A gentle…lyric spirit is manifest in the watercolors of Lawrence Kupferman.  Suggestion through rich evanescent color is Kupferman’s approach—…of wind-blown foliage or tide-moved water weeds, the sense of sunlight on a May morning or the mysterious mantle of an August night and of stars seen through pine trees, and of the feel of the sea through shapes and colors calling up marine images. These paintings are poetic visions of the inner eye.”   Other references: Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, American Painting Today (Hastings House, NY), p. 98; Who Was Who in American Art (1985) p.351; John I.H. Baur, Revolution & Tradition in Modern American Art (Harvard University Press, 1951) p. 71, image 95; exhibition catalogue Lawrence Kupferman Retrospective, Fuller Memorial, Brockton, MA (ca. 1978) and more.

Kupferman’s genius created an artistic language of evolving, progressing, resonant imagery that is universal, intimate, poetical and haunting.