Jacques Kupfermann information

Jacques Herbert Kupfermann (1926–1987) was an American Expressionist painter who was born in Vienna, Austria. His work, both abstract and figurative, divides into several distinct periods, reflecting both his early influences and later lengthy sojourns in countries as far apart as Mexico and Norway. Renowned for his portraits as well as landscapes, his subjects include many eminent figures. His distinctive use of impasto, the typically Expressionist love of the paint itself and rich earth colours, are perhaps some of the defining features of his work – as are his love of bleak Northerly scenery, the combination of delicacy and vibrant movement discernible in his still-life subjects, and an aura of tenderness and serenity even where a certain turbulence seems to lurk beneath the surface. Though he resisted making any obvious political or sociological statements in his work, it is not difficult to see how his early years in Vienna with all its uncertainty, daily threats and background violence, might have influenced his later paintings.

His talent was discernible at a very early age. It both provided some escape and release from what was going on all around him and literally acted as a lifeline, as it was his art teacher who helped him escape the country and the fate suffered by his parents. Elias and Mina (née Feuermann), who remained in Vienna, were later to be deported and killed in Minsk, Belarus. His father, Elias, had been a self-taught lawyer and inventor; his mother, Mina, a governess to a minor Austrian Royal. He had one sister, Frederika, who fled Vienna for Palestine, making her way via Scandinavia, in the early 1940s. The celebrated cellist Emanuel Feuermann was his mother's cousin.