Even though the Spanish philosopher and writer George Santayana never saw East Hampton artist Michael Knigin’s works, his description of an artist as being “a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world” quite accurately describes Michael, a good friend and colleague, who died last week at the age of 69 after succumbing to lung cancer.
This is especially true of Michael’s most recent digital photographic collages, which were dreamlike reveries of storm-tossed waves under skies banded by surreal elements, each conjured from the deities of the natural world melded with the controlling hand of an accomplished artist. Finding order in chaos amid the swirl of the ocean surf, the works illustrated Michael’s ability to invent rhythms and forms appropriated from nature itself, but then transformed into very human reveries reflecting the amalgamation of both fact and fiction. Conjuring worlds that are, by turns, overwhelmingly immense and exquisitely intimate, his works echo the sculptor Anish Kapoor’s observation that “Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.”
But for artists, the making of mythologies has its costs, uppermost being the press of time to realize and create the images that they have floating in their heads. As the painter Martin Kippenberger noted, “A good artist has less time than ideas”—a concept that pertained to Michael the first time I met him playing tennis, where I recognized the same restless energy in his game that was later made evident in his approach to painting.
Moving about the court less at a run than with an intense crab-like scuttling, he often betrayed a measure of impatience with my own more measured pace of play and seemed intent on speeding things up, as if the game was a mere prelude to more important things that needed to be attended to. As a result, I wasn’t surprised upon hearing that his response to learning of his cancer diagnosis was to turn to his doctor and say (with what I’m sure was some degree of only partially whimsical impatience), “I haven’t got time for this shit.”
Born in 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, Michael graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where, during his junior year, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to study lithography at the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.
Upon graduation in 1966, Michael taught at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in Manhattan, where he started a fine art lithography studio and, after a year and a half, opened his own publishing company, Chiron Press, the first facility in the United States that combined lithography and silkscreen printing. Reading like a who’s who of the artist community at the time, Chiron featured prominent artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, and Andy Warhol, and included, as one of the employees, a young Brice Marden.
After publishing two important books on lithography that were used extensively at colleges and art schools around the country, Michael sold Chiron Press and was invited by the Israel Museum and the Jerusalem Foundation to establish the first professional lithography workshop in Israel. In addition, he also worked in Israel with the Ministry of Labor and Education along with internationally known artists from around the world, after which he returned to New York and was appointed a professor at Pratt Institute, where he taught for 37 years until his retirement in 2005.
In 1988, he was appointed to the NASA Art Team and was sent to the Kennedy Space Center to visually interpret the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, celebrating NASA’s return to space after the Challenger disaster in 1986. Three years later, in 1991, he was asked to revisit the theme and to record the touchdown of Space Shuttle Atlantis when it returned from orbit to California’s Edwards Air Force Base.
He received a number of awards, including a Cleo Award for Art Direction, two Certificates of Merit from the National Society of Illustrators, an Art and Technology Grant, and a fellowship of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
In addition to his 17 solo exhibitions and approximately 120 group shows, his work is included in more than 60 major museums and corporate collections including the Albright-Knox Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Whitney Museum, Library of Congress, Mint Museum, Israel Museum, Citibank, NASA, Bank of Tokyo, and Playboy Enterprises, among many others.
His wife, the artist Joan Kraisky, survives him and has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations in Michael’s name be made to East End Hospice.
A memorial service is planned for May 1 at 10:30 a.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton.
on Jan 25, 2011