KUPKA, Frantisek (Opono, 1871 – Puteaux, 1957)
Frantis¹ek Kupka was born in the Bohemian village of Opocno on 23 September 1871. In 1888, after a short apprenticeship at the School of Arts and Crafts of Jarome¹r¹, Kupka first studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and eventually entered the Vienna Akademie der Bildenden Künste where he trained under the guidance of the Nazarene painter August Eisenmenger. There, Kupka developed a stylised mode that culminated in his earliest significant commission, a monumental allegory featuring The Last Dream of the Dying Heinrich Heine, which was executed for the Wiener Kunstverein and aroused the admiration of the Viennese public. Highly attracted by philosophical and spiritual matters and eager for new experience, Kupka moved to Paris in 1894 where he initially worked as an illustrator for books and satirical periodicals such as L’ Assiette au Beurre. In Paris he gradually abandoned his early symbolist manner and directed his artistic research towards the reification of intellectual concepts within a non-figurative pictorial space. In 1906 Kupka settled in the suburban area of Puteaux, near Paris, and was joined by Jacques Villon. The house of Villon, brother of Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, became a meeting place for many avant-garde artists of the period. Together with Robert Delaunay (and in parallel with Kandinsky in Germany) the artist steered his artistic path toward abstraction and at first experimented with a series of compositions based on chromatic sensationalism. His precursory inclination for theoretical and abstract forms of representation also contributed to isolate him from the rest of the Parisian avant-garde milieu which responded hesitantly to his innovative (although sometimes cryptic) experiments. Kupka became interested in the relationship between music and art and more particularly in the analogy between colour and sound as demonstrated by his 1909 composition Piano Keyboard: The Lake (Prague, Trade Fair Palace). In 1912 the artist exhibited at the Salon d’Automne the large-scale painting Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours which was poorly received by both public and critics. The artist’s commitment to generating an alternative reality through painting increased after World War I. He became interested in disciplines such as biology and physiology and eventually published a book that summed up his controversial proposal for a new aesthetics: Creation in Plastic Arts (1923). Although Kupka’s activities in France were highly appreciated in Eastern Europe the painter held his first one-man exhibition only in 1921 at the Povolozky Gallery and finally won the approval of the Parisian public. A decade later the artist contributed as a founding member to the creation of the international group Abstraction-Création which had been conceived by Théo Van Doesburg and included amoug its ranks Hans Arp, Albert Gleizes and Georges Vantongerloo. After a period of hiding during World War II, Kupka returned to Puteaux where he continued his artistic experiments. From 1946 he regularly contributed to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and his fame began to spread abroad as demonstrated by the great number of New York galleries and museums that exhibited his works during the 1950s. Kupka died on 21 June 1957 in Puteaux.
D L
<< back