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Frantisek Kupka will be remembered in the history of twentieth century art as one of the pioners of abstraction. At the early date of 1912 Kupka surprised the public in the Autumn Salon in Paris with his Amorpha. Fuge in Two Colours, the first totally abstract work exhibited publicly. At the same time in Munich, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky developed a major new method and theory of abstraction between 1910 and 1912, based on ideas taken from music and philosophy.
Of an independent character, Kupka experimented with abstract painting in a very individual manner although coinciding with Kandinsky's ideas in that for him painting, as with music, had the capacity to express itself exclusively through formal values without the need to imitate or copy any external reality. He also maintained a distance from Cubism, the Avant garde aesthetic prevailing in Paris at that time. However, he did form links with some artists of the Cubist circle, such as the brothers Jacques Villon and Duchamp Villon, his neighbours in Puteaux. Kupka actively participated in their discussions on simultaneity in art, the representation of movement and the Bergsonian ideology of time, which was so much in vogue at that period.
The two versions of Positionings of Mobile Elements and the numerous preparatory drawings, made during the winter of 1912 to 1913, are the culmination of the development of a new, non objective artistic language, based on rhythm and harmony and represent one of the best examples of Kupka's abstract approach. The objective world is transformed into a visual grid which structures the painting while the forms are generated in space through a geometric structure which uses the idea of the melody of the painting.
In the present painting, Positionings of Mobile Elements I, the dynamic structure of the composition is balanced by a vertical axis which, as Meda Mladek has noticed (1998), may recall earlier naturalistic works such as the Symbolist illustrations which Kupka made for the L'homme et la terre by Elisée Reclus. In Positionings of Mobile Elements II (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which is also dominated by a centripetal dynamic force similar to that of the present painting, all the elements of the composition converge on a single focal point. It acts as a sort of window to the infinite, an empty space which would gradually increase in Kupka's later work, culminating in his almost white and empty compositions of the following decade.
In his essay Creation in the Visual Arts, Kupka set down his ideas about art as a means of creation of images on the margins of nature. The phrase "Positionings of mobile elements (Localisation de mobiles graphiques)" frequently appears in his writings where it is defined as the process of exteriorisation of an element which arises from within the artist rather than from the visible world. "In our interior visions fragments of images float before our eyes. In order to capture these fragments we unconsciously weave lines between them, and in thus constructing a web of relationships, we arrive at a coherent whole. These lines drawn to organise our visions are like stereoscopic points between fragments in space."
Paloma Alarcó
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