Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)

Executed in 1955, Sunset Blvd. is a rare painting by American artist Allan Kaprow, in which tactile streaks of ochre, peach and brown swirl joyfully. Kaprow is legendary for his canonical Happenings, participatory events during which the artist engaged directly with the viewer in order to bring art into everyday life, but he began his career as a painter. Although he studied with the celebrated Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman, with their vivid colours and flattened forms these early works reveal the influence of artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque and Paul Klee among others. Like his predecessors, the materiality of paint was of central importance to Kaprow, and in painting, he was ‘searching for something beyond the paint’ (T. Micchelli, ‘Allan Kaprow, Before the Happenings’, Hyperallergic, 3 March 2018). Inspired by this concept, Kaprow and his contemporaries co-founded an artist-run cooperative gallery, Hansa, which similarly sought to advance new and creative attitudes toward painting. Sunset Blvd. was exhibited at Hansa, and created while Kaprow was teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey, pivotal years for the artist during which he helped to co-found the Fluxus group. The dynamism of this work foreshadows the artist’s growing interest in movement and performative interventions, later formalised in the highly choreographed actions of the Happenings. Sunset Blvd. forms a bridge between Kaprow’s early interests and the work that would bring him international recognition. In this painting, his nascent investigation into action, enacted here on the canvas, ferments and expands.