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Lot Essay
‘An oil painting from 1956 is on hand to suggest where [Kaprow] came from, though its very title, “Hysteria,” sends Abstract Expressionist high-mindedness out the window. By 1958, he was immersed in the Environments and Happenings that made him famous, an amazingly fertile and dynamic body of work with an afterlife in the installation genre today’ (H. Cotter, ‘Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts – “Experiments in the Everyday”’, The New York Times, 19 November 1999).
Best known as the originator of ‘Happenings’ – the multidisciplinary performance events of the late 1950s and 1960s – Allan Kaprow began life as a painter, versed in the prevailing trends of Abstract Expressionism. Executed in 1956, Hysteria is a rare example of the artist’s early forays into action painting, demonstrating the emphatically gestural visual language that would ultimately lead him to lift his art from the confines of the canvas altogether. The dynamic energy with which Kaprow daubs his clamouring chorus (‘Ha Ha Ha’) would, just a few years later, be liberated from its painterly incarceration through real, live action. Combining oil, silver foil and fabric, the work demonstrates the trans-medial sensibility that would go on to define the ‘Environments’ and ‘Happenings’ of Kaprow’s subsequent practice.
In 1999, Hysteria was included in the exhibition Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts – Events, Objects, Documents at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in Columbia University – Kaprow’s alma mater – and became something of a talking point in the show’s reviews. In Hysteria we can already detect the pioneering spirit which would lead Kaprow to fully immerse himself in the relatively unchartered waters of performance art.
Best known as the originator of ‘Happenings’ – the multidisciplinary performance events of the late 1950s and 1960s – Allan Kaprow began life as a painter, versed in the prevailing trends of Abstract Expressionism. Executed in 1956, Hysteria is a rare example of the artist’s early forays into action painting, demonstrating the emphatically gestural visual language that would ultimately lead him to lift his art from the confines of the canvas altogether. The dynamic energy with which Kaprow daubs his clamouring chorus (‘Ha Ha Ha’) would, just a few years later, be liberated from its painterly incarceration through real, live action. Combining oil, silver foil and fabric, the work demonstrates the trans-medial sensibility that would go on to define the ‘Environments’ and ‘Happenings’ of Kaprow’s subsequent practice.
In 1999, Hysteria was included in the exhibition Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts – Events, Objects, Documents at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in Columbia University – Kaprow’s alma mater – and became something of a talking point in the show’s reviews. In Hysteria we can already detect the pioneering spirit which would lead Kaprow to fully immerse himself in the relatively unchartered waters of performance art.