Word: kupka
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Code of Shapes. This kind of nonsense only served to confuse Kupka's image more, and so for most people he remains the least known of all the significant figures in early European modern ism. A full-dress retrospective was needed. Now it has come: 190 paintings, drawings and studies, opening this week at New York's Guggenheim Museum...
...show is the result of three years' research by Art Historian Margit Rowell, whose catalogue-assisted with material from another student of Kupka's art, Meda Mladek-becomes the definitive work so far on this little-known, uneven but (at best) engrossing artist...
...Kupka was one. Among the earliest paintings in this show is a dark still life, done around 1906, of a red cabbage plucked from the garden at Puteaux -leaf after exuberant leaf, dappled and veined, spiraling inward toward its round core. This system of forms crops up in painting after painting from Kupka's maturity, like the large and magisterial Around a Point, 1925 (see color page). It carried for him a weight of symbolic associations that had to do with growth, movement and cosmic energy...
Since his youth, Kupka had been intensely interested in spiritualism; he was a frequent hiker on the astral plane...
...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...