Baby

Allan Kaprow’s first works were in action painting and assemblage, and then he gradually moved on to happenings in the form of intermedial performances with simultaneous plot strings and active crowd participation and blurred borders to everyday life. The surface of Baby, which Kaprow calls an action collage, is composed of stacked materials. These come from the artist’s own surroundings and were selected according to their availability. This painting is no longer a two-dimensional surface simulating spacial depth, but instead literally pushes forward into the surrounding space, of which it becomes an integral component. The large format causes the beholder to grasp the painting in all its physicality. Baby is also full of autobiographical allusions. Schematically outlined bodies and the word fragments VAUGH and HAN refer to Kaprow’s wife VAUGHN, who was about to give birth to their first son when the work was made, as the title indicates. Kaprow’s work developed via environments, which were definite expansions into real space, to the genre of the happening, as he himself said (Originalaufnahme Kaprow): “… I carried over from my experience as a painter-collagist something of the fragmentary colliding of marks and shapes of a collage into a collage of events, such as I mentioned, sweeping the floor, drinking some water and after a while, after one or two years, in the early sixties, well, those collages of events became my first happenings.“