Wet & Dry

Ten U.S. museums, including Manhattan's Metropolitan, own Lawrence Kupferman's precise drypoints of decaying Victorian mansions. So far as Kupferman is concerned, these pictures are just museum pieces now. At 39, he bubbles with a new enthusiasm--making abstract paintings of crawling sea life. They hardly looked like the work of the same man. Exhibited in Manhattan last week, the paintings nonetheless showed the same craftsmanship he once lavished on academic art. Kupferman had changed horses in midstream and done it with the dexterity of a circus rider. The question was, why?

His early drypoints had described the hollow shell of a vanished culture, and done it literally. "The important things today," he says, "are first the chaos, murder, rape and war in the world; and second, the spirit of scientific inquiry, the interest in atoms and cellular growth." He thinks his new paintings reflect a little of the science, if not of the chaos.

Kupferman himself is no scientist. The son of an Austrian cigarmaker, he put himself through art school by soda-jerking in Boston's North Station, and graduated to become a guard in the Boston Museum (which now owns several of his works). Kupferman drinks coffee by the potful in order to keep painting far into the night. He spends his days teaching and banging the brasses for modern art. "I used to be an introvert," he confesses, "but now I even talk to people on streetcars."

Kupferman's new paintings tell very little about their squirmy wet subject matter; they jumble and reassemble it to make complex and technically brilliant designs. The abstractions had started with careful drawings of shells, starfish and seaweed that he and his five-year-old daughter found on the beach at Provincetown. He took to thumbing through scientific books illustrated with diagrams of tentacled polyps, and the nervous systems of sea worms and cross sections of jellyfish, because his wife made him throw out all the sea life he had brought home. "The house smelled like low tide," she complained. Finally Kupferman put away the books too, and then he was all set to be an abstractionist.

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