František Kupka

Czech painter and illustrator

• Born: September 23, 1871
• Birthplace: Opočno, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Czech Republic)
• Died: June 24, 1957
• Place of death: Puteaux, France

Kupka painted what were probably the first abstract modern paintings, beginning around 1911. He also was a talented illustrator of books and magazines and an important theorist of abstract art.

Early Life

František Kupka (FRAHN-chih-shehl KEWP-kah) was the eldest and brightest of Václav Kupka’s five children, but the family lacked the money needed to send him to high school. This lack of formal education was a source of regret and humiliation for Kupka for years thereafter. He was instead apprenticed to a local saddler. He hated the profession, but the saddler introduced him to spiritualism, and Kupka grew into a talented medium. Kupka began his formal study of art at age seventeen, with Alois Strudnica, who was interested in ornamental abstraction. Strudnica had his students draw and work with geometric forms, rather than constantly copy from models as many conservative teachers did. Strudnica also introduced Kupka to the Nazarenes, an early nineteenth century art movement whose followers wanted to return art to the spirituality of the late medieval German artists. Kupka’s own tendencies found resonance in the Nazarene belief that contemplation should be a principal source of artistic inspiration. He moved to Prague in 1888 to attend the Prague School of Fine Arts, becoming the star pupil and supporting himself by working as a medium. He lived in abject poverty, experiencing several mental breakdowns as a result. Kupka’s extreme sensitivity led to the debilitating bouts of depression from which he suffered for the rest of his life.

In 1892, Kupka moved to Vienna and attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. The artistic and intellectual milieus that he found during his four years in Vienna were an important influence on his work. The Jugendstil decorative arts movement was in full flower in Vienna; its influence, combined with the simple geometry of Viennese architects such as Otto Wagner and the Czech folk art to which he was exposed as a child, helped push Kupka onto the long and twisting path toward abstraction. Kupka also read voraciously in Vienna, studying the German philosophers and theosophy and becoming fascinated by the interrelation of color and music. He became interested in the vivid colors of stained glass and studied Greek and Gothic architecture, which confirmed his belief that mathematics could be related to art. He achieved some artistic success in Vienna, executing portraits of the Empress Elisabeth and others in the court. In 1894, he became involved with the Danish clothes designer Maria Bruhn, for whom he did fashion designs.

Life’s Work

In 1896, Kupka moved to Paris, looking for broader artistic horizons, and quickly became a successful illustrator for several socialist and anarchist periodicals. He was a first-class draftsman and produced excellent drawings, etchings, and lithographs in a detailed, dramatic style influenced by the Symbolist and Art Nouveau currents flowing through Paris at the time. Kupka also had a good eye for satire; his journalistic illustrations were exhibited in Paris and Czechoslovakia. By 1905, he was a sought-after book illustrator, working on “The Song of Songs,” contemporary French poetry and fiction, and the Greek myths. In 1906, Kupka married Eugénie Straub, and the couple moved to the village of Puteaux on the outskirts of Paris, where the rent was low and Kupka had the isolation that he needed to work. Kupka continued to paint during this time, becoming a member of the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and regularly exhibiting there for years.

Kupka’s training had been in the academic tradition and so had his style, but he wanted to go further, to express things that representational art could not express. He believed that the painting of such objects from nature as trees was pointless when one could see “better ones in reality.” In Paris, Kupka was exposed to the same French preoccupation with the formal means of painting that led to cubism, and it opened his eyes to new possibilities. Starting around 1905, his work underwent a rapid evolution, becoming increasingly abstract, concentrating on color and motion. In 1908, Kupka painted Girl with a Ball , inspired by his stepdaughter’s playing with a red and blue ball in his garden. He was frustrated with the inability of traditional painting methods to depict the motion that he saw. When he finished this painting, he continued doing sketches, trying to draw motion. He ended up with studies that look like interlocking curves and arcs, barely recognizable as a human body or a ball. Kupka continued to experiment in this direction, and soon his canvases bore no resemblance to external reality.

In Newton’s Discs (1911-1912), Kupka paid tribute to Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with color and motion. Newton discovered that, if a disc is painted with every color of the spectrum and then spun, the colors merge to form white. Kupka painted a series of interlocking discs, concentric circles of motion spreading out from them. The motionless disc at the top of the painting is bright red, like a miniature sun. The colors become cooler and more dilute as the motion increases, until the final, rapidly spinning disc at the bottom of the painting is grayish white. He applied what he had learned from this work to his studies of the girl and ball and came up with Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912), sinuous lines of motion in red and blue on a black-and-white background. Many art historians believe that the painting’s exhibition later that year was the first public appearance of a work without an objective subject, and the public reaction was predictably that of bewilderment and outrage.

Kupka, however, received admiration from other artists. He met regularly with Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Francis Picabia, all of whom admired math and science as much as Kupka and were influenced by his work. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire defended Kupka’s brand of painting, labeling it “orphism.” Soon other artists, notably Robert Delaunay, were exhibiting paintings in a similar style. Many critics lumped Kupka’s work with that of the cubists, but Kupka vigorously denied that cubism had any similarity with or influence on his own work. He became paranoid, believing that others were stealing his ideas, and acquired a reputation as a difficult and taciturn man.

World War I ended this period of Kupka’s life. As a foreign national, he was under no obligation to join the war effort, but he did so anyhow, serving at the front and becoming ill as a result. After the war, Kupka began painting again and intensified work on his theoretical writings started in 1910. He finished his volume of theory on the plastic arts around 1919, but it did not appear until 1923, and then only in Czech, though it was originally written in French. The only theoretical work on abstract painting to be published earlier was Wassily Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst insbesondere in der Malerei (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, 1912).

Kupka’s work continued to evolve, sometimes looking more geometric, sometimes more organic, but always full of sweeping, cosmic motion that has reminded many viewers of music. Animated Lines (1921) depicts semicircles in browns and grays falling from all sides down a whirlpool to a point near the bottom left of the canvas, while huge arcs of green and blue come shooting back out again. The effect is like the climax of a Romantic symphony.

In 1921, Kupka had his first one-man exhibition in Paris. It was a critical success but unfortunately an economic failure. Kupka had been impoverished again for some time but was named resident professor of the Prague Academy in Paris in 1922, which somewhat eased his financial situation. During the late 1920’s, he did a series of abstractions of imaginary machines. Starting in the 1930’s, he did hard-edged paintings of geometric shapes lines, rectangles, trapezoids, and circles arranged in bold compositions. Once again he suffered from health and financial problems. He also endured relative artistic obscurity, though the Jeu de Paume in Paris devoted an entire exhibition to Kupka and his friend Alphonse Mucha, an Art Nouveau illustrator, in 1936.

Kupka spent World War II in Beaugency, on the Loire River, painting very little because of poor health. After the war, his artistic fortune took a turn for the better. In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought a number of his paintings, on the advice of Duchamp, and a major exhibition was organized in Prague to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday, after which the government of Czechoslovakia bought twenty of his paintings. His work appeared in many other major exhibits during the following years, and, in 1951, he signed his first contract with a gallery. In 1956, the Museum of Modern Art bought more of his works, and he donated many of his preparatory drawings to them. After his death in Puteaux on June 24, 1958, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, in Paris, organized a major retrospective of his work and bought several paintings.

Significance

Kupka was unquestionably a pioneer, and his work influenced many of his contemporaries; his exact place in twentieth century art is, however, still being debated. There has been much argument about whether Kupka was the first abstract artist. Many art historians believe that he was, while others award that prize to Delaunay or Kandinsky. Many critics believe that Kupka was not as consistent as these other artists, or that he stumbled into abstraction, while other artists got there along a clearly recognizable path. His work does not resolve itself into tidy patterns and therefore receives far less critical attention than that of other artists. Another criticism is that his abstractions were too decorative, deriving as they did from the spirit of ornamentation, while the work of the other early abstract artists is considered more “rational.”

For whatever reason, Kupka’s work has never been as fashionable as that of other pioneers of twentieth century art. No doubt his own reclusive tendencies contributed to this status, as did his belief that an artist’s mission is cosmic a view considered to be out of touch with twentieth century currents. Few, however, doubt Kupka’s importance to the evolution of twentieth century abstract art, and not many painters have come close to his ability to depict motion. His work continues to go through periods of renewed interest, which often coincide with major Kupka exhibitions.

Bibliography

Andel, Jaroslav, and Dorothy Kosinski, eds. Painting the Universe, František Kupka: Pioneer in Abstraction. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997. This book accompanied an exhibition of Kupka’s paintings and includes essays analyzing his art, reproductions of work, and a bibliography.

Boice, Bruce. “Problems from Early Kupka.” Artforum 19 (January, 1976): 32-39. Boice focuses on Kupka’s earliest abstractions and the disputed dates at which they may have been painted, attempting to assess Kupka’s contributions to abstract art relative to that of his contemporaries.

Fauchereau, Serge. Kupka. Translated by Richard-Lewis Rees. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. Contains fairly extensive passages from his theoretical writings. The text is short but informative, and the 137 high-quality color reproductions are indispensable.

Kupka, František. František Kupka, 1871-1957: A Retrospective. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975. Contains several scholarly articles, written to accompany a large exhibition of Kupka’s work, as well as an excellent chronology and a biographical essay. Probably the best introduction to Kupka’s work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Kupka: Gouaches and Pastels. Text by Jean Cassou and Denise Fédit. Translated by Robert Erich Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964. Kupka’s gouaches and pastels show the intermediary stages through which his work went on the way to abstraction. The authors present succinct essays on Kupka’s rapid evolution, concentrating on his exploration of the formal means of art.

Vachtová, Ludmila. Frank Kupka. Translated by Zdeněk Lederer. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968. Perhaps the most thorough biography of Kupka, containing many facts not available elsewhere. Vachtová was not allowed to leave Czechoslovakia to do research, so this book lacks some information on Kupka’s work in Paris as well as an understanding of what other artists were doing in Paris at the time.