František Kupka valuation
Czech illustrator and one-time spiritualist medium who painted some of the first abstract pictures shown in Paris.
František Kupka was born at Opočno in eastern Bohemia in 1871 and trained at the academies in Prague and Vienna, supporting himself for years as a spiritualist medium.
What a work by František Kupka is worth
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Bio
František Kupka was born at Opočno in eastern Bohemia in 1871 and trained at the academies in Prague and Vienna, supporting himself for years as a spiritualist medium. He settled in Paris in 1896 and worked as a satirical illustrator for magazines such as L'Assiette au beurre. Around 1910 and 1911 his interest in colour, music and movement took him into abstraction, and at the Salon d'Automne of 1912 he showed Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours, among the first wholly abstract paintings exhibited in Paris. Apollinaire placed him among the Orphists, a label he resisted. He lived at Puteaux, near the Duchamp brothers, and died there in 1957.
Works from the first decades of abstraction, roughly 1910 to 1930, are the most important and are largely in museums, notably the National Gallery in Prague and the Centre Pompidou. Kupka worked slowly and returned to compositions over many years, so dating can be complex. Gouaches, pastels and drawings form a substantial body, and there are illustrated books and prints from his years as an illustrator. Expert opinion is normally sought for any significant work.
At a glance
- Born
- 23 September 1871, Opočno
- Died
- 24 June 1957, Puteaux
- Movements
- Orphism, Symbolism, Abstract art
More on Wikipedia.
Vienna, the illustrations and Abstraction-Création
In Vienna Kupka was drawn to theosophy and to the circle of the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. In Paris his illustrations included the plates for Élisée Reclus's L'Homme et la Terre. In the First World War he served with the Czech volunteers in France.
In 1931 he was among the founding members of Abstraction-Création, and the Grand Palais in Paris gave him a retrospective in 2018.
The Beaux-Arts, The Yellow Scale and the Discs of Newton
At the Prague academy from 1889 to 1892 Kupka painted historical and patriotic subjects, and in Vienna he turned to symbolic and allegorical ones, exhibiting at the Kunstverein in 1894. In Paris he spent a short time at the Académie Julian and then studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens at the École des Beaux-Arts. He settled at Puteaux in 1906 and showed at the Salon d'Automne for the first time that year. The Yellow Scale, a self-portrait of about 1907 built around the colour yellow, is often taken as his masterpiece, and Piano Keyboard/Lake, of 1909, marked his break with representation.
The first Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909, impressed him deeply. From about 1910 he drew up colour wheels after Isaac Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz, which led to the paintings Discs of Newton of 1911 and 1912, and in 1911 he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group. Blaise Cendrars wrote about him in La Main coupée as a soldier at least 25 years older than the rest of the regiment; he left the front with frostbite after nights in flooded trenches. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice holds his Vertical Planes of 1911 and 1912 and studies for Amorpha. He was a vegetarian and practised naturism.
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