Hank Kupjack flips on a light in a cramped storage vault, and a dozen flights of imagination take off all at once. A little sea captain’s study complete with a tiny, tiny ship in a bottle inspires thoughts of a grizzled sailor daydreaming of a distant journey. A replica of Alexander the Great’s battle tent stirs visions of a sand-swept Middle Eastern landscape.
“This one is actually a copy of my parents’ dining room in their house in Park Ridge,” Kupjack says, pointing out a room filled with sturdy, Colonial-style furnishings. “Dad built the furniture himself.” The miniature furniture, and the life-sized stuff as well.
“Dad” is the late Eugene Kupjack, the craftsman of 37 of the 62 Thorne Miniature Rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago and widely considered the king of American miniaturists.
The elder Kupjack died in 1991 at 79, and although his would seem a hard act to follow, Hank, 44, has done just that.
Now Hank stands on top of the world of miniatures, a field including manufacturers and collectors of tiny period home furnishings and other objects that go into creating tiny, scale tableaux. Kupjack Studios makes entire rooms, from rugs to chandeliers, that are on display in museums around the country and in the collections of some very rich patrons.
There are probably a half-dozen American artisans doing work comparable to the Kupjacks’ today, but none with the weighty reputation of the Park Ridge family and some of their European counterparts, collectors say. And the client list for Kupjack rooms, which can cost as much as $250,000, has included such names as Marshall Field V and Malcolm Forbes.
Eugene Kupjack began his unlikely career in 1937, when the display artist began work on a series of rooms for wealthy art patron Narcissa Thorne of Chicago. These rooms were presented, along with 25 rooms Thorne had assembled in Europe, to the Art Institute in 1941.
Eugene Kupjack may be best known for the Thorne Rooms, but the lifelong Park Ridge resident created more than 700 rooms in his lifetime, bringing Hank into the business in the 1970s and ’80s. Many are displayed in museums, while others were sold for a brief time in the early ’60s at Malcolm Franklin Antiques, then a Michigan Avenue gallery, and still others were privately commissioned.
Today, Hank and his brother Jay, 42, who is principally a photographer, work mostly by commission at their workshop tucked away on Park Ridge’s Main Street, bringing to pint-sized life the dreams of wealthy customers. Hank, a collector of fine furniture who lives in a converted storefront in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, is the primary artist, while Jay, who lives in his late parents’ home in Park Ridge, has developed a 3-D photographic process that brings images of the rooms to life.
“We’ve kept a pretty low profile here,” Hank admits. Of course, when the price tag for your work starts at $50,000, the customer base tends to be small. It includes Carol Kaye, whose collection of miniatures (“Not doll houses!” Kaye says) is estimated to be worth in excess of $10 million and features 19 Kupjacks.
“I wish I could own every single piece he has,” says Kaye, who opened a museum in Beverly Hills, Calif., last summer to share her collection, the world’s largest, with the public.
“He’s a real artist. His realism is very precise. It’s mind-boggling,” Kaye says.
Hank Kupjack is constantly witness to the hypnotic pull of miniature work on observers and seems faintly bemused by it.
“People seem to have a fascination with small things,” Hank says. Jay adds: “People want to have a fantasy existence–just the way they want it. Then it’s kind of the Gulliver thing–you’re so big and they’re so tiny!”
Sometimes, Hank says, “people ask for little people. But we don’t do that. They’d look like mannequins, and it fights with the realism.”
Thomas Hoving, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, once characterized miniatures as “summoning up more residual life than any other art form.”
While it provides a jumping-off point for the imagination of the casual viewer and serious collector alike, a miniature room to Hank Kupjack is more like a series of tricks, illusions put in place to form a perfect, harmonious slice of history.
“People are always looking for mistakes,” Hank says. He defies you to find them.
Because, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, by the time Kupjack sits down at a workbench to carve, cut or paint a piece with myriad tiny tools such as a jeweler’s drill, he has already done lots of homework.
Some projects involve painstaking research. For the Czarina Alexandra’s sitting room done for Malcolm Forbes’ Magazine Gallery in New York, Hank Kupjack had only one archival photo, showing just a corner of the room. Through several libraries, Kupjack finally located a floor plan of the St. Petersburg palace as it had been in 1915 from a 1780 rare book in Austin, Texas. A translator aided Kupjack in deciphering the details. Objects in the room included tiny Faberge eggs, which Kupjack fashioned from silverplate and goldplate.
For a 1940s diner for Kaye, Kupjack visited diners to inspect an industrial-sized coffee urn so his would be made properly. The diner’s painstaking detail includes a tiny leather jacket hanging from a hook and a pack of cigarettes on the counter.
In one of the European-designed rooms in the Thorne collection at the Art Institute, a clock actually works, and drawers pull out of a chest .
The Kupjacks “are illusionists,” Hank says. “To a lot of people, a miniature marble table top should be marble. This makes no difference to us.”
Marble is painted wood in a Kupjack miniature. Wood, metal and clear plastic (for glass objects) are common mediums for their rooms. Many miniature replicas can’t be “real” anyway. The brush strokes of an oil painting, for instance, can’t be duplicated beyond a certain size, so they use reductions of prints.
Collectors aren’t necessarily looking for precision.
“There’s a very strong fantasy element and wish fulfillment to miniature collectors,” says Sybil Harp, editor of Nutshell News, a magazine for miniature hobbyists.
Although the miniature hobby market is estimated at 50,000 to 100,000 people who spend up to $75 million annually, these are people who collect small furnishings a piece at a time and may construct their own rooms and houses for them. “The Kupjacks are not in that scene,” Harp says. “But people who collect and can afford it will always want to have a Kupjack.”
A typical Kupjack client might include, in addition to Kaye and Forbes, the big corporation that had a copy of its chairman’s office made upon his retirement; Field and his wife, Jamee, who gave each other Colonial American rooms; and a mysterious New York heiress who commissioned a garden room with a pavilion from a French chateau. For the garden room project, a gift for an artist friend, all the communications were handled through her attorney. “We speculated about the significance of that pavilion,” Kupjack says slyly.
The demands of the very rich can be quirky, Hank Kupjack admits, but he is used to working with them, having grown up visiting Mrs. Thorne and Mrs. P.K. Wrigley at their homes and having known a variety of other financially endowed people.
The rich, Kupjack says, “are one of two ways. There are people who don’t want to be overcharged because of who they are, like Malcolm Forbes. Others will call you on their car phone and don’t care what it costs.”
Of these rich clients, there are few. The Kupjacks’ workshop is not crammed with commissions. The yearly total is around four or five orders, and it takes six weeks to four months to complete a room.
Jay Kupjack calls the building process “really, just a few tricks,” but the art suggests far more subtlety than that. All the rugs in a Kupjack used to be woven by a Wisconsin cousin named Lee Meisinger (she still does one occasionally), and the carving and finishing of furniture is laborious.
Although Hank Kupjack grew up in his father’s studio and studied architecture in college, he didn’t really envision himself carrying on the tradition. He made a brief foray into the music business in California before deciding to join his father in business. “This was easy,” Kupjack says of his decision.
The work isn’t always. Every bit of concentration and fine motor skill may be required for hours as Kupjack glues himself to a workbench with a drill and an array of carving tools to fashion some tiny object such as a scale Louis XIV chair from photos and drawings of an original.
For inspiration, all Kupjack needs to do is visit the vault (built for protection against fire) to see the father-son collaborative efforts in the Kupjacks’ 40-piece personal collection (12 are currently on loan to museums and libraries).
Eugene Kupjack’s spirit is very much alive in the studio. A black-and-white photo of the elder craftsman, staring cantankerously, is pinned prominently to a wall in Hank’s office. “He looks like he’s about to say, `What are you looking at?’ ” Jay says.
But the legacy will likely end with this generation. Hank has no apprentices, and neither he nor Jay has any children. “Occasionally this gets brought up to me,” Hank says. “I’m not old enough to think about that yet.”
