Kupferman studied at the Boston Museum School beginning in 1928 and, in 1935, received his B.S. in Education from the Massachusetts School of Art. He taught at the latter institution until his retirement in 1969. During the Depression, he was employed as a WPA artist (1937-40).
Kupferman began his career in the 1930s with a series of drypoint prints of Boston's Victorian mansions for the WPA. In 1942, Monument of an Era, a drypoint of an old Victorian house, won fourth prize in the Artists for Victory Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.
When recommending Kupferman for NAD membership, John Taylor Arms, praised his work:
Mr. Kupferman is not only an expert technician with the drypoint needle, but even more conspicuous than his technical skill, is his unusual point of view, for he has chosen to perpetuate Victorian architecture in a pictorial record of that era. There is, however, nothing of the dry result one might expect from such a declared purpose; instead there is a high depress of imagination in his prints and a strongly marked creative quality that imbues his quaint subjects with a feeling of fantasy which is extremely interesting and provocative.
Later Kupferman entered an expressionist phase with his treatment of the slums in the south end of Roxbury, Massachusetts. By 1943, he was working not only in drypoint, but also in watercolor, oil, egg tempera and encaustic and emulsion-tempera on gesso panels.
He began spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1946, where he was one of the first to use the abstract expressionist technique of poured paint. In 1949 Kupferman wrote to the NAD to request that his classification be changed from graphic arts to painting. Although this was not granted, it reflects the major change that his work was undergoing.
Kupferman had a show at Mortimer Levitt in New York (1948) where he exhibited a series done on the theme of the ocean meeting the shore. In the 1960s he did a series called "Landscapes of the Mind" which were abstract interpretations of psychological states.
