Word: kupka
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...French eyes, Frantisek Kupka was, for the last 20 years of his life, an ir relevance: a withered Czech emigre, with sunken cheeks and a disproportionately large appetite for food, who lived in a small cluttered house in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, surrounded by old abstract paintings that nobody wanted...
When collectors and dealers walked by their gate to call on Villon, Kupka and his mountainous wife Eugenie would peer through the shutters at them, too proud to show themselves. The collectors never stopped at the Kupkas'. In the past, they had been so poor that Eugenie Kupka now and then had to buy old tablecloths and underwear in the flea market, launder them and sell them to raise a few francs...
...years before his death in 1957 at the age of 86, Kupka was able to subsist on the sales of his work...
However, in those last years of the School of Paris, when French cultural chauvinism was quite as bloated as its American counterpart later became, Kupka labored under a distinct handicap: his obvious foreignness as an artist. His work looked, and in deed was, Northern rather than Mediterranean, full of theoretical obsessions, flights of mysticism, involuted decor, heavy symbolism and transcendental yearnings. There have been greater abstract artists than Kupka, but none so unmistakably Slavic. Later, when Kupka's eminence as a pioneer of abstract art was recognized-his first completely abstract pictures were done around 1910-11-the French...
...seems to be one of the claimants to the honor of having produced the first deliberately abstract works of art. His wavy-edged pastel, Abstraction After a Stained-Glass Window in the Cluny Museum, dates from 1900, fully a decade before the mutual creation of abstract art by Larionov, Kupka, Kandinsky and Arthur Dove. Amiet's work, though less aggressively avantgarde, is also of more than parochial quality. After his early apprenticeship with Gauguin's disciples in the Pont-Aven group, he never lost his interest in broad, ripe patternings of color. The colors - as in Apple Harvest...