Word: kupka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...planets rolling quietly. After that it was difficult to come back to the trivia of everyday life . . ." The connection between such experiences-or hallucinations-and the airy spaces of his paintings, filled with rainbow arches and planet-like balls, is obvious. (He also liked to frequent the Paris Observatory.) Kupka's belief in binding energy-a theosophical equivalent of Dante's "Love which moves the Sun and the other stars"-could not be contained in everyday objects. "Alas," he wrote, "nature is ever changing, rapid are its metamorphoses. The laws of physiology are beginning to be disseminated; Daguerre...
Like Marcel Duchamp, Villon and the futurists, Kupka seized the threat by the horns, using photographs to revise his practice as a painter. In a figure painting entitled Planes by Colors, Large Nude, 1909-10, Kupka had taken the un inhibited color of Fauvism and given it a dense, architectural solidity (it seems right that the model's pose, monumental as it is, should mimic that of Michel angelo's Leda). The problem was now to set those planes in motion; for that, Kupka resorted to one of the great novelties of the time, the high-speed sequential...
Blue Triangle. There was a religious, or at least numinous basis to nearly all of Kupka's imagery; even a strict geometrical abstraction like Untitled, 1931, retains in its big blue triangle a flicker of pointillist light that had been appearing in his work since he began studying the stained glass of Chartres...
...like the work of many another pioneer abstractionist with high spiritual ideals and an overoptimistic belief in the powers of art, Kupka's painting remains somewhat hermetic-at least in terms of its declared ambitions. About his historical precedence, there is no doubt...
...modern art. And yet the fundamental subject of his work remains inaccessible. It is like hearing someone describe an LSD trip: the cosmic hoo-ha is all there, but the listener cannot experience it in the retelling. Deprived of the heavenly choir of theosophical documents, all too many of Kupka's transcendental visions finish as pattern-not an ignoble fate, but less than he intended...