Background

Frank Kupka was born on September 23, 1871, in Opocno, Bohemia, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. He was the son of a small town notary. Unhappy living with his father and stepmother, he often left home, spending time in a Capuchin monastery where he was fascinated by the murals the monks painted. He eventually wandered from place to place in Bohemia, making his living as an itinerant painter of commercial signs, banners, and saddles.

Education

At the age of 16 Frantisek was sent to a local craft school and later to the Prague School of Art. From there he went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and eventually to Paris in 1894. In Paris he attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Académie Jullian, supporting himself doing magazine and book illustrations and giving drawing lessons.

Career

In the first decade of the 20th century Kupka became known for his illustrations and his etchings and prints. His painting during this period was conventional, a popular mixture of Art Nouveau, French Symbolism, and Eastern European Decorative Arts. While he showed in the official salon exhibitions, he did not receive much attention until after 1909-1910, when his work went through profound changes. He abandoned traditional renderings of nude women, landscapes, and still-lifes and began painting what he felt was the distillation of movement into line, form, and color with only a lingering trace of a subject. His canvasses at this time were dense, painted in bright, pure colors with swinging and vibrating arches and curves. A series of disc paintings, remarkably similar to the disc paintings of Robert Delaunay, was the result of a fascination with the motion of his stepdaughter bouncing a ball and his desire to capture its dynamics rather than appearance. His painting was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Despite his professed anarchism, he joined the French army and fought in the trenches alongside the French poet Blaise Cendrars. He was wounded and returned to Paris.

After the war Kupka worked in the French Department of Defense, taught students from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, and resumed painting. He became committed to the idea of abstraction, which he continually refined until his death. He considered his work to be research into giving ideas plastic form. He claimed his paintings illustrated ideas in science, physics, astronomy, and biology, in all of which he was widely read. He was also knowledgeable about world religions and was particularly interested in the modern esoteric religion Theosophy, which tried to reconcile spiritualism with science. Throughout his life Kupka had a strong interest and, some claim, an involvement with the occult.

Later in his life, almost like a scientist, Kupka divided his work into categories that were thematic rather than chronological, such as "Fugue for Two Colors, " "The Organic Cycle, " and "Stories of Shapes and Colors. " Kupka worked on several paintings at a time, often working and reworking a single canvas over a period of years. At times his work resembled the spare, geometric paintings of the Russian Constructivist Kasemir Malevich and the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, while at other times he would resume working in themes that suggested his earliest abstractions. His bright palette and overall composition remained constant.

The years around World War I were active ones for European painters, and Kupka worked and showed alongside such other Parisian artists as Robert Delaunay and Marcel DuChamps and his brother Jacques DuChamps, as well as the Italian Futurists and German Expressionists. But by nature Kupka was irascible. He feuded with his Parisian colleagues and withdrew his work from at least one important exhibition, "The Section d'Or" in 1912, because of aesthetic disagreements with the other exhibitors. He felt that they were negative, decadent, and academic. Compared to their rational formalism, Kupka was a romantic and a mystic. He was particularly at odds with Delaunay as their work overlapped at a time of great competition among painters to establish themselves as the originators of new ideas.

After these early years Kupka was not associated with any circle of artists and critics and was written about less and less. Gradually he was almost forgotten as the history of Modernism was written. After several shows in the early 1920s he worked privately and exhibited rarely until 1946, when he had a major show in Prague followed by one in New York and finally a major retrospective in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne in 1958, a year after his death. After that there were a number of exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, as well as a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1974.

Achievements

• Frantisek Kupka was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic Cubism (Orphism). He worked as an illustrator of books and posters and, during his early years in Paris, became known for his satirical drawings for newspapers and magazines.
  
  Kupka's work gained critical attention beginning in the 1970s as the history of 20th-century painting was examined more broadly to include the work of such secondary figures as Kupka, who were slightly out of the mainstream, but nonetheless important artists in this period.
  
  Retrospectives were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1958 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975.

Works

More photos

• illustration

  • Front cover of the 'La Liberté' issue, from 'L'Assiette au Beurre'

    1906

  • Front cover of the 'L'Argent' issue, from 'L'Assiette au Beurre'

    1902

• painting

  • Sphinx

  • Head of slut

    1909

  • The Black Idol (Resistance)

    1903

  • Woman Picking Flowers

    1909

  • Self-Portrait

    1905

  • Danse Macabre

    1896

  • Study for "Autumn Sun"

    1905

  • Autumn Sun, Three Goddesses

    1906

  • Diagonal Planes

    1925

  • Always poor

    1902

  • Organization of Graphic Motifs

    1912

  • The Lotus Soul

    1898

  • Oval mirror

    1911

  • Blue

    1914

  • The Crowning of Helen

    1906

  • Two grays I

    1928

  • The Song of Songs

    1904

  • Creation

    1920

  • The chestnut tree in blossom

    1906

  • Vertical Plains Blue and Red

    1913

  • Syncopated Accompaniment (staccato)

    1928

  • Ordination of verticals

    1911

  • The Gallien girl

    1910

  • The Little Girl with a Ball

    1908

  • Study for "Autumn Sun"

    1905

  • Cathedral

    1913

  • Algiers

    1903

  • Report

    1903

  • The Beginning of Life

    1900

  • Babylon

    1906

  • The Wave

    1902

  • Equality (Money)

    1902

  • Boudoir scene

    1903

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • The man and the earth

    1904

  • Lipstick

    1908

  • The Way of Silence

    1903

  • Sleeping Face

    1902

  • Drawings of curves

    1926

  • The novelist

    1903

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • Yellow Spectrum

    1907

  • Replica of Fugue in Two Colors: Amorpha

    1912

  • Humanitas

  • The guy

    1910

  • Crimson

    1908

  • Money

    1899

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • Positioning of Mobile Graphic Elements

    1913

  • Water. The Bather.

    1907

  • Woman and horse

    1906

  • Fanny Machine - The machinery

    1928

  • Women in the tavern

    1903

  • I do not care

    1902

  • Hindu Motif, or Graduated Red

    1921

  • Warm Chromatics

    1912

  • Study in black and white

    1924

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • Study of chapter

    1908

  • Piano Keys Lake

    1905

  • Disks of Newton, Study for Fugue in Two Colors

    1911

  • Bathers

    1906

  • Drill

    1926

  • The victorious dragon

    1900

  • Ballad of Epona

    1900

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • Admiration

    1899

  • Lying naked, Gabrielle

    1898

  • Creation

    1920

  • Self-Portrait with Wife

    1908

  • The tree

    1906

  • Nocturne

    1910

  • Bather

    1906

  • Planes by Colors (Great Nude)

    1909

  • Procession

    1905

  • Music

    1936

  • Woman Picking Flowers

    1909

  • Madame Kupka between verticals

    1911

  • The Book Lover

    1897

  • Prometheus in chains

    1905

  • Two grays II

    1928

  • Tango

    1909

Views

Quotations: "Colour is, both for the artist who uses it and for the spectator who perceives and assesses it, the vehicle of the impression... [Every color] provokes different sensations. Though with identical functions, each color makes itself known by a specific vibration."

Membership

• Abstraction-Création , France

  1931

Connections

Frantisek Kupka married Eugenie Straub.

Spouse:

Eugenie Straub

References

• Frank Kupka; pioneer of abstract art