Artists - Part 24

 Kurt Kauper

Yesterday we saw a couple of paintings by Kurt Kauper of hockey player Bobby Orr.  Kauper, born in 1966, has taught at Yale and Princeton and currently teaches art at Queens College, City University of New York.  Above is a self portrait a few years ago (he looks a bit older now).

Here's a photo of Kauper in his studio in 2004.  He's painting a portrait of Boston Bruins player Jacques Plante, and on the wall is his (unauthorized) nude portrait of Bruins player Derek Sanderson.  Neither player sat for a portrait.  Kauper works from photos, hockey cards, and his imagination.

He seems to have a thing for Boston Bruins players.  He says, "I’m not a hockey fan ... but when I was 6, I — like many other boys in Boston — idolized Bobby Orr. Looking back, it was as if I was in love with him.”

Although Kauper's paintings of Bobby Orr's nudity were based on his imagination, Derek Sanderson was not shy about exposing himself. Above is one of several nude photos of Sanderson taken by LIFE photographer Arthur Rickersby in 1979. Sanderson's father is at left. You can see the other photos of Sanderson here: https://unashamedmale.blogspot.com/2021/03/athletes-part-5-derek-sanderson-derek.html.

Neither Bobby Orr nor Derek Sanderson posed for Kauper's nude portraits or authorized them. Brad Park, who played briefly alongside Sanderson and Orr and looked at Kauper's works online, said, "I definitely would think Bobby would be uncomfortable with it. Derek, in his heyday, would have posed for it."

Bobby Orr and Derek Sanderson are not the only celebrities that Kauper has made unauthorized nude paintings of.  He also did several of Cary Grant.   Above is Cary Grant #1.

This is Cary Grant #3.  Kauper says that people always assume he's gay (presumably because of his nude male paintings), when in fact he's not.  He lives with his wife and kids in New York.  He has also done a large number of paintings of women, some nude, most not.

Having said that, he does seem to like naked men.  This is Fantasy #1 - Bus Stop, 2019.

This is Fantasy #2, 2019.

We end with this recent painting that he was asked to do for an exhibition of works inspired by Manet's famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which depicts a naked woman and two clothed men having a picnic in a park.  In Kauper's version, Men in the Park, 2022, there's one clothed man, two naked men, some empty beer bottles, and no women.