Word: kupka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FRANTISEK KUPKA, along with his better-known contemporaries, Kandinsky and Mondrian, pioneered abstract painting. To look back at his prolific work is to trace the history of twentieth century aesthetics, and the development of an art that tries to embody concepts--non-objective art. Born in 1871 in Czechoslovakia, Kupka came to Paris, the center of artistic activity in 1896, and soon settled down in the suburb of Puteaux, where he lived the rest of his life...
...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...
...paintings show Kupka's sizeable vocabulary of line and color, the grammatical expertise of his construction, and the complexity of the thought he is trying to convey. But the majority of the works fail to make an artistic statement. It's hard to pinpoint Kupka's shortcomings. Certainly he had a clearly defined idea of his art (even if it's hard to follow...
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...
...contemporary series "Woman Picking Flowers" is more experimental. Kupka breaks down the components of a motion (picking flowers), colors them in the progression of the spectrum, and superimposes them one on the other in what seems to be an expression of simultaneous motion and sunlight. The result does not go much beyond the level of an exercise--though in the last two or three, where the lines of the motion begin to dominate, rather than the fragmented forms, there appear hints of a new fusion...