Allan Kaprow's 1959 Portrait: Art and Life Blurred

A 1959 photograph by Fred W. McDarrah shows Allan Kaprow seated on a crate before a fruit vendor's display in New York, during preparations for his seminal work '18 Happenings in 6 Parts' at the Reuben Gallery. The image, published in art press 2 n°24 (February-March-April 2012), captures Kaprow in a seemingly mundane moment, yet it embodies his 1958 essay 'The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,' where he called for artists to reveal the everyday world anew. Kaprow later distanced himself from this portrait and the simplistic equation of his practice with merging art and life. In his 1979 text 'Performing Life,' he noted that 'paying attention transforms what we pay attention to' and regretted that artists must always be present to point out the quotidian. He concluded that happenings were 'far from being as close to life as I had supposed,' and by the 1970s, his work shifted toward an art of living and self-knowledge—a lesser-known Kaprow too difficult to photograph.