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Ad Code: 4
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An example of work by Richard Kurman
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Following is a biography, submitted August 2002, based on information provided by the artist:
Born August 8, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, Richard Kurman is primarily known for naturalistic, abstract, and semi-abstract landscapes that express symmetry of line, shape, and color, and suggest calm and serenity. His goal through his expression is to find reason, order, and harmony, and he prefers abstraction because he can do what he wants with color. He works exclusively in oil on canvas. Although much of his career was spent in Germany, he and his wife settled in Eldorado, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he works from an immaculate studio whose walls are lined with his paintings, many of them from Germany and Italy.
Kurman, of Germanic lineage, moved around as a child with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and St. Louis, Missouri. He studied art and art history at The St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University, St. Louis and earned an M.A. Degree in 1968. Instructors there were Fred Conway, William Fett, Werner Drewes, and Fred Greene Carpenter. He also studied at the University of New Mexico under Raymond Jonson, Adja Yunkers, and Enrique Montenegro. As a Merit Scholar with a stipend, Kurman studied further at the Art Students League in New York, New York under painters Julian Levi and Frank Reilly,
Kurman has illustrated several books including D. Pillsbury "Star Over Adobe" and "Steinbeck and His Critics." He was also a book designer of twenty or more books in German and English.
For many years he taught art history at Eastern Washington State College and then in Germany where he had a sabbatical, which he extended to two decades. For much of his time there, while he continued his painting, he was a seminar leader, training engineers and managers in English communication. Many of his exhibitions were in venues of businesses for whom he worked. He also worked as a cartoonist and illustrator, doing humorous drawings for a series of booklets on German and American culture and etiquette. He loved this illustration work and in retrospect said if he had been born a generation earlier, he would have been content as a professional illustrator in the tradition of Norman Rockwell.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, Kurman lived in Albuquerque, where he received his master of fine arts degree at the University. When he retired, memories of his time in that part of the country and its peaceful surroundings led him and his wife to settle in New Mexico.
Artist Statement: "The formal approach I use in constructing a picture is always a direct translation of natural objects. The frame work I may borrow occasionally is based on principles used by Piero della Francesca, Vittore Carpaccio, and Caravaggio. For me, the history of art over five centuries must be continued with reverence and understanding or the work will not survive. I am not a friend of amorphous 'art'."
Kurman's first solo exhibitions began in 1948 when his work was exhibited at the Artists Guild of St. Louis, Missouri. In 1970, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, and 1985, he had solo exhibitions in Germany including Stuttgart and Biberach. Most recent Exhibitions include Century Gallery, Santa Fe, Canyon Road Contemporary Art Juried International Landscape Competition (Award of Excellence) Santa Fe, and a Theme Exhibition "Thirteen ways of Looking at a Mountain" at the Mountain House Contemporary Art Gallery in Glorieta, New Mexico. His submitted painting, derived from the Amargosa Mountain Range in California, was in the style of geometric abstraction and took the viewer through geometric ideas rather than realistic images.
In 1999, Kurman's paintings were exhibited in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico in a retrospective show of work by former students of Raymond Jonson, "Professor Johnson--Teacher of Art and Ideals."
Kurman was mentioned on page 56 of ART IN AMERICA Vol. 4 1961, in an article by Elaine de Kooning which reports on the activities of New Mexico painters, in particular, pupils and former pupils of Raymond Jonson.
Private and Public Collectors of Kurman's work include, in addition to the above mentioned institutions:
Margareta and Ray Ericksen, Rolling Hills, CA
Mary Lou and Robert Platt, Lyme CT
Mary Anna Hudson, Houston TX
La Familia Medical Center, Santa Fe NM
Jeanne Priest, Newport RI
W. Breinersdorf, Pontormo, Italy
Dornier Aerospace Industries, Immenstaad, Germany
ZF Friedrichshafen Research and Development, Friedrichshafen, Germany
Amy Siedlecki, Chicago. IL
Elke Haug, Peter Haug, Biberach, Germany
Galerie Höehn, Biberach, Germany
Bertram Waller, Westport, CT
Edgar Hallermayr, Munich, Germany
Prof. Dr. W. Blauth, Kiel, Germany
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