Word: kupka
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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...
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...