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Franti_sek Kupka
Opoc_no, 1871-Puteaux, 1957
Kupka was a Czech illustrator and painter active in France and one of the pioneers of abstract art.
He was born in a small village in Eastern Bohemia and trained in Prague and Vienna. He moved to Paris in 1896 and worked there as an illustrator. In Paris he encountered an atmosphere which was more congenial to the development of his art and he was influenced by Neo-impressionism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Kupka was not influenced by Cubism although he mixed with some artists of the Cubist circle, particularly the brothers Jacques Villon and Duchamp-Villon, who lived in the same quarter of Paris, Puteaux. Kupka took part in their discussions on simultaneity in art, the representation of movement and the Bergsonian concept of time which was then so fashionable, but he never took part in the group's activities.
Of an independent nature, Kupka gradually developed his non-objective vision of art and at the early date of 1912 surprised the Autumn Salon with his series entitled Amorpha, the first totally abstract works exhibited in public. Kupka's abstraction, filled with meanings and philosophical intent, looked to music and the theories on the eruption of energy. His central European background and his leaning towards German Romantic philosophy always influenced his approach to art and kept him apart from French positivist thought. Like Kandinsky, he considered that painting, like music, could only be expressed through formal values. In his essay The Creation of the Visual Arts he set down his ideas on art which he saw as a means to create images aside from nature.
At the end of his life he was alone and his work was little appreciated. He died in his house in Puteaux in 1957.
Fauchereau, S.: Kupka. Barcelona, 1988.
Franti_sek Kupka,1871-1957. A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975.
Franti_sek Kupka ou l'invention d'une abstraction. Exhibition catalogue Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1980-1990.
GREEN, CH.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The European Avant-gardes. Art in France and Western Europe 1904-c.1945. London, 1995.
Mladek, M., Georgievska-Shine, A. and Fauchereau, S.: Kupka, Localización de móviles gráficos, 1912-1913. Contextos de la Colección permanente, no. 6. Exhibition catalogue Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 1998.
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