Richard Rappaport

Who is Richard Rappaport?

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.