![]() As such, it not only is one of the earliest examples of abstract painting, but demonstrates the artist’s interest in mystical correspondences between painting and spiritual notions that Charlene Spretnak hones in on in her important book The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art.įrantišek Kupka, “Discs of Newton” (1912), oil on canvas, 100 x 73,7 cm, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 (© Adagp, Paris 2018 © Philadelphia Museum of Art) In “Amorpha” time becomes a vigorous loop (no longer a line) as a process torques within itself to become what it always was to begin with. This claim is supported with his vertiginous Orphist-Cubist works, “Discs of Newton” (1912), with its roiling solidity that takes on an almost sculptural quality, and “Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors” (1912), inspired by Notre Dame’s stained glass windows and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1912. Installation views, František Kupka: Pioneer of Abstraction(photo by Didier Plowy)īefore departing Bohemia, versatile Kupka experimented with symbolism and religious allegorical themes - and this exotic taste for evocation informed his subsequent experiments with nonrepresentational color, form, space, and line to the point where this little-known Czech painter is now heralded as an “inventor” of pure abstract art. There he began drawing heated satirical illustrations, like “Balance All That” (circa 1901), for radical French magazines such as L’Assiette au beurre, a satirical magazine with anarchist political leanings. ![]() Born in Eastern Bohemia in Austria-Hungary in 1871, he was an adventurous intellectual who after graduating the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague stirred through fin-de-siècle Vienna before moving to bohemian Montmartre in 1896. Kupka was an artist’s artist of strong subjective conviction, grounding his paintings in ideas mined from mysticism, radical politics, philosophy (like Henri Bergson’s “flux” concept that imagines that intuition’s grasp of the perpetual becoming of time to be the innermost core of meaningful reality), poetry, science, and Asian cultures. This is at long last expiring with his remarkable retrospective of some 300 paintings, manuscripts, photographs and engravings curated by Brigitte Leal, Markéta Theinhardt, and Pierre Brullé at the Grand Palais. PARIS - František Kupka (aka Frank or François Kupka) has been routinely recognized more for his influence on Marcel Duchamp’s paintings than for his own. Rmn-Grand Palais, photo by Philippe Migeat) František Kupka “Plans by Color (Woman in Triangles)” (1911) oil on canvas, 109 x 99,5 cm, collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne achat, 1957 (© Adagp, Paris 2018 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM / CCI, Dist.
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