Word: forme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kupka's oeuvre remains in the suburbs of art. The paintings reflect the currents of the time; they imitate, sometimes innovate, but they lack that certain force of original expression. Kupka is unwilling to take his experiments with line, color or form all the way; he tends to eschew the radical for the pleasing. Perhaps as a result of this tentative quality, he never developed a style of his own. Though his paintings can be grouped into "periods" and arranged in chronological sequence--as has been done at the Guggenheim show, which closed last week--these periods are not stages...
...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 shape and perspective. But as Kupka notes on one sketch: "here...maybe I am regressing to the post card." And the final result is a very indifferent painting--as the artist evidently felt himself, judging...
...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...
...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...
...conception of his art: "the highest endeavor of human spirituality." This canvas transcends paint to become an audible as well as visual experience. Red and blue curves rotate across the black and white disks of the background to create a visual rhythm. The color is music, the form is motion. In these exhilarating bright sweeps across an indefinable plane, Kupka has painted the sound of celestial bodies spinning in space...