"Gorky's style with its wandering line and its amophous stains of color approaches the unattainable 'pure phychic automatism' which is part of the anti-aesthetic; rather it establishes a different kind of order based on personal calligraphy and a fluid counter point of line and shape. In endless personal vibrations this intro-spective art has become one of the most widely practiced branches of abstraction today... Lawrence Kupferman has stopped painting realistic Victorian houses to flow bright colors into blurred, kaleidoscopic patterns. They styles are are as many and as different as the personalities of those who produce them...They range from the sharp, quasi-geometrical constructions of Charles Howard to the swirling network of lines and spots of Jackson Pollock; from the Dada-like precision of Jimmy Ernst to the Jeweled viscera of Charles seliger; from the fragile elegance of Mark Rothko (before his recent change in style) to the grotesque and brooding images of William Baziotes."
-excerpt from John I.H. Baur, Revolution and Tradition in American Art, Harvard University Press

"Lawrence Kupferman, painting instructor at Boston's Massachusetts School of Art, in his recent second New York show presented watercolors and oils in which he creates pure color poetry. Based on the lower order of aquatic life, his abstractions are given titles such as 'Microscopic Structures of the Sea,' or 'Inner Life of the Tide,' which in the continuous whirl and flow of brilliantly hued buy loosely defined shapes, interpret the endless cycle of procreation."
-Art News, January, 1950

"Recent abstract canvases by Lawrence Kupferman at the Levitt Gallery also derive their inspiration from the sea. Employing amoebic antennnaed forms and a blurred, runny technique of oil and watercolor, these painting suggest a world or submarine flora and fuana caught in a swirling lava-like flow of brilliant flame color. Individual forms cary poetic suggestion in their gem-like luster and mysteriousness that comes of their minute, fascinating particularization."
-The New York Times, April 9, 1948

"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
mid-stream 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
new 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 in Provincetown.  He took to thumbing through scientific books
illustrated with diagrams of tentacled polyps, and the nervous systems of
sea worms and c ross sections of jellyfish, because his wife made him throw
out all the sea life he 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 abstactionist."
-Time Magazine, April 19, 1948

"Lawrence Kupferman (1909-1982) responded to the lessons of surrealist
automatism and biomorphism in a highly poetic and personal manner.  Like his
contemporary and friend, Mark Rothko, Kupferman worked as a WPA artist, and
first exhibited in New York in the early '40s.  However, he chose to make
Boston his home and became historically more associated with the
expressionist school in that city, which included jack Levine, Hyman Bloom,
and Karl Zerbe, than with the first generation of the New York School.  This
carefully selected exhibition of four oils and seven works on paper
reinstates Kupferman as a pioneer in the development of Abstract
Expressionist technique and theory.

Kupferman's abstractions are clearly based upon the artist's experience of
the ocean.  (He spent many summers in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann,
Adolphe Gottlieb, William Baziotes, and Rothko).  Organic and biomorpphic
drips and swirls of paint dominate his images.  "Protozoan Community #2,"
1947, shows Kupferman's interest in the relationship between poured paint
and marine biology.  The piece explodes with fluid blotches and tentacles of
color.  Delicate, quivering filaments and projectiles define and emanate
from amoebalike forms.  An underpainting of blue, yellow, and green washes
suggests the fresh water where a community of protozoa exists.  There is no
focal point in this work:  it seems to have been created by carefully
controlled accident.  The artist's ebullient sense of chaos illuminates this
spirited ocean landscape.

Flying in an airplane over Cape Cod, Kupferman became aware that the ocean
had no top or bottom, and he incorporated this concept into his allover
biomorphic abstractions.  In "Microscopic Landscape," 1949, a darkly sublime
watercolor, Kupferman signed his name on all four sides of the piece,
suggesting that it could be seen and appreciated from any direction.  Here,
a predominant wash of black watercolor and casein ink recalls the dreamy
surreal fantasies of Paul Klee's black paintings from the '20s.  Kupferman
gives light to his spectral image of the watery depths of the ocean through
carefully delineated swimming sea creatures and abstract forms.  Like Klee,
he combines an inner vision with an outer experience of the world.

In "Microscopic World," 1950, black washes merge with sensual red forms,
which are themselves overlaid with tiny webslike mosaics.  The piece is
evidence of the artist's fascination with the electron microscope.
Kupferman experienced the infinite poetry of nature through viewing
enlargements of algae and studying cell structure, and he made oblique and
direct references to the microscope in several of his paintings.  The artist
demonstrates a strong sense of wonder at the rhythmic beauty of the sea and
its relationship to the blood that flows in our own veins.  His work is
organic abstraction of the highest order."

                                - Francine Koslow, Artforum, March, 1990