Word: colorable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...executed this extremely cerebral (!) conception with skilled craftsmanship: an eloquence of line, a designer's eye for color...
What the show demonstrates, however, is that art theory plus craft does not equal art. Each of Kupka's major works is hung so that it is prefaced by a group of his preparatory line and color studies. Too often, in the progression from the fluent immediacy of the crayon sketch to the lyrical color study to the painting, the art loses itself in an exercise, becomes stilted, studies. The line drawings for the "Girl with a Ball" (1907-8) reveal a great sensitivity to form, the color studies a highly developed Fauvist technique, in which an unrestricted palette expresses...
...more successful series culminates in "Planes by Colors: Large Nude" (1909-10). Here the simply conceived form of the reclining woman in the sketch is amplified by the free, expressive use of color--green highlights, purple-pink shade. The personality seen in the line is universalized by the abstraction of the color: the painting is a vibrant whole...
Using motion as the integrating force was Kupka's first step towards a school of' painting Ezra Pound called "Vorticism The (theoretical) aim of the group, as Pound saw it, was "to portray the idea of motion itself." Kupka began trying to capture motion through the vibrancy of color; in "Newtonian Disks" (1912) the pure tones, reds, blues, yellows, are liberated from form. They no longer express the form of an object, but establish their own rhythm, make their own music...
...STUDIES from "Newtonian Disks", which follow that painting in sequence down the ramp of the Guggenheim museum, blend almost imperceptibly into studies for "Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors." This painting is too large to be hung where it should chronologically be placed; one has to descend in suspense through Kupka's "pseudo-Expressionist," "pseudo-Mondrian" and "art deco" periods before finding it, at the bottom. "Fugue," painted in 1912, is indeed greater than anything else Kupka ever did. It represents a culmination of his nonprofessional interests--astronomy, music, and mysticism--as well as his artistic abilities: his skill with color...