Richard Rappaport

Richard Rappaport
1994 - The German Girl - Nos. 1 and 2
Born	1944 (age 72–73) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Education	Carnegie Mellon University, Brooklyn College
Known for	Painting

Richard Rappaport (born 1944 in Pittsburgh) is a classically trained painter of portraits and large-scale figurative works whose pictorial evolution has spiraled towards and away from the Renaissance ideal for half a century.

In his work, even when taking the image to abstraction, Rappaport keeps the iconic figure as primal source. Besides portraits of psychological depth, Rappaport, in the tradition of painting as an act of remembrance, borrows Christian iconography to represent the Holocaust, the Nigerian Civil War, and the war in Vietnam.

A former student and friend of Robert L. Lepper at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, Rappaport is one of the artists influenced by Lepper’s course “Individual and Social Analysis”. His 1989 paper “Robert Lepper, Carnegie Tech, and the Oakland Project” is the principal source on Lepper’s influence on Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky when they were Lepper’s students.

Since 1981 Rappaport’s use of the advertisement pages of international art magazines as a place of exhibition has been his principal form of public presence. This includes issues of Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Bomb, Modern Painters, World Art, The New Criterion, and Limn.

From early on Rappaport showed unusual promise in drawing the human face making emotionally credible portraits of family and friends from his eighth year on of which the culminating work is the reverential drawing of his great-grandmother (1954) made soon after his tenth birthday. Then for three years, starting in fifth grade, the young artist attends the Carnegie Institute's (now The Carnegie) Tam O'Shanter art class which is followed at thirteen by a year of Saturday afternoons in traditional apprenticeship in painting with the realist/surrealist artist Abe Weiner. Already an accomplished draftsman at seventeen, Rappaport is awarded the gold medal in drawing in the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in the spring of 1962 before entering the Department of Painting & Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh that autumn the same time his older brother Robert Rappaport, who would become the television art director of the Mike Douglas Show and the Miss Universe Pagent, enters the Drama Department in stage design.