František Kupka

František Kupka, also known as Frank Kupka or François Kupka, was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic Cubism (Orphism).

Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art.

Kupka 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. In 1906, he settled in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and the same year exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne. Kupka was deeply impressed by the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. Kupka's 1909 painting Piano Keyboard/Lake marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract around 1910-11, reflecting his theories of motion, color, and the relationship between music and painting (orphism). In 1911, he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group (Section d'Or). In 1912, he exhibited his Amorpha. Fugue à deux couleurs, at the Salon des Indépendants in the Cubist room, although he did not wish to be identified with any movement. Creation in the Plastic Arts, a book Kupka completed in 1913, was published in Prague in 1923.

In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création. In 1936, his work was included in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in an important show with another Czech painter, Alphonse Mucha, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. A retrospective of his work took place at the Galerie Mánes in Prague in 1946. The same year, Kupka participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where he continued to exhibit regularly until his death. During the early 1950s, he gained general recognition and had several solo shows in New York.

Between 1919 and 1938 Kupka was financially supported by his good friend, art collector and industrialist Jindřich Waldes who accumulated a substantial collection of his art. Kupka died in 1957 in Puteaux, France.

Kupka had a strong interest in color theory and freeing colors from descriptive associations (which is thought to have possibly influenced other artists like Robert Delaunay). Margit Rowell described his painting The Yellow Scale (c. 1907) as "Kupka's first attempt to come to terms with color theory in which the result is both personal and successful". Although a self-portrait, the subject of the painting was the color yellow. Around 1910 he began developing his own color wheels, adapting a format previously explored by Sir Isaac Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz. This work in turn led Kupka to execute a series of paintings he called "Discs of Newton" (1911-12).

Planes by Colors

The Colored One

Reminiscence of a Cathedral

Blue SpaceWorks in Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy:

Study for Woman Picking Flowers (Femme cueillant des fleurs), ca 1910

Study for Amorpha, Warm Chromatics, Chromatique chaude and for Fugue in Two Colors (Fugue a deux couleurs), ca 1911-1912

Vertical Planes (Plans verticaux), 1911-1912

Study for Organization of Graphic Motifs I (Localisations de mobiles graphiques I), ca 1911-12

Around a point (Autour d'un point), ca 1920-1925Other works include The Cathedral (Katedrála).

In March 2021, Kupka's Le Jaillissement II sold for GBP 7,551,600 in an auction organized by Sotheby's, so far the highest price for his work.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024