Kupka frantisek biography template

His first personal exhibition was held in Paris in while he was appointed Professor at the School of Fine Arts in Prague. In he joined Abstraction-Creation. After a series of paintings on the theme of machines around , music inspired others, including Jazz Hot no. His role as a pioneer of abstraction was only fully recognized after his death , thanks to major exhibitions including the retrospective organized in by the national Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris.

He is the master of the orphism, a term coined by Apollinaire to characterise the purely chromatic lyricism of the colours. He died in isolation and alienation at his Puteaux home in Visit Collection Exhibitions Activities Education. Print page. Study for the Language of Verticals. Kupka enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna , where he concentrated on symbolic and allegorical subjects.

He was influenced by the painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach — and his naturistic life-style. Kupka exhibited at the Kunstverein, Vienna, in His involvement with theosophy and Eastern philosophy dates from this period. Cendrars describes him as a "proud soldier, calm, placid, strong", but really too old to be a soldier, being at least 25 years older than the rest.

She marched with them, carrying her husband's bag and his rifle. She would have marched all the way to the front, but at the end of the first day the colonel had her arrested and sent back to Paris. She later made her way to the front lines to spend time with her husband. Kupka himself left the front due to frostbite in the foot, caused by nights in the trenches waist-deep in freezing water.

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 , 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 in Le Figaro.

His work became increasingly abstract around —11, reflecting his theories of motion, color, and the relationship between music and painting orphism. In , he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group Section d'Or. The geometric forms in this example are all arranged vertically and of this Kupka noted in Creation in the Plastic Arts that "In the vertical there is all the majesty of the static.

It contains at once the top and the bottom, combining them In its solemnity, the vertical is the backbone of life in space, the axis of all construction; it monumentalizes the most trivial sketch that has been squared" Through the canvases of Abstractions Kupka sought a truth outside of pictorial representation. By breaking painting down into its constituent parts the artist does not allow the viewer to relate the shapes to their visual understanding of the world, instead they must interpret the inner meaning of them, revealing a hidden reality which will differ for each viewer as they bring their own experiences to bear on the painting.

Kupka frantisek biography template

As early as , Kupka wrote "The straight line represents the abstract world. It is absolute", these images represent a culmination of this belief. For financial reasons, he left school and started work at the age of 13 for a saddle maker. This lack of formal schooling remained a source of humiliation for Kupka throughout his life and inspired him to engage in extensive self-education.

Although he disliked his job, his first employer introduced him to spiritualism and he incorporated ideas relating to this into his early work. After a couple of years Kupka left this role and travelled around Bohemia earning money through sign painting. During this time he cemented his interests in philosophy, history and painting. Strunicka prepared Kupka for entry to the Academy of Arts in Prague in In he moved to Vienna and enrolled in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts concentrating on allegorical and symbolic subjects.

He had some success as an artist in the city and was commissioned to paint a handful of portraits for members of the court. He also read heavily, devouring everything from anatomy to philosophy and chemistry to witchcraft and his interest in Eastern philosophy, Theosophy and occult practices dates from this period. He combined these various spiritual sources to develop his own belief system which focused on the existence of an invisible reality hidden beneath surface appearances.

In , the artist left Vienna and visited London and Scandinavia before settling in Paris. Like his countryman Alfons Mucha, Kupka earnt his living by working as an illustrator, cartoonist and designer, creating posters for cabarets such as the famous Le Chat Noir. Coming from a modest background and having struggled to make ends meet throughout his artistic training, he was sensitive to the social and political events in France and grew close to Parisian anarchist circles.

Along with artists such Theophile Steinlen, Jean-Louis Forain and Felix Vallotton, his cartoons were commissioned by satirical, socialist and anarchist reviews including l'Assiette au Beurre and Les Temps nouveaux. He also began to experiment with different styles of painting incorporating elements of the Fauvist, Symbolist and Post-Impressionist work that he saw in the capital.

In , Kupka married Eugenie Straub, known as Nini and moved to Puteaux, a village on the outskirts of the capital where rent was lower. Here he continued to work as a cartoonist but also began to focus on his painting again and around his style became increasingly abstract, capturing ideas of color and motion, in part inspired by the first Futurist Manifesto published in Kupka attended many of the group's gatherings and met artists, writers, scientists, and mathematicians who had an impact on his work.

Through this association Kupka, along with Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay , developed a type of Cubism focused on bright colors and the purely abstract. In the poet and art critic, Guillaume Apollinaire named this type of work Orphism , specifically referencing three of Kupka's works as examples of the style. Writing a year later, Apollinaire described Orphism as "the art of painting new totalities with elements that the artist does not take from visual reality, but creates entirely by himself An Orphic painter's works should convey an untroubled aesthetic pleasure, but at the same time a meaningful structure and sublime significance".

Orphism did not survive beyond World War One, but is now viewed as a key transitionary style between Cubism and abstract art. In , Kupka presented his painting Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors at the Salon d'Automne, this monumental composition was one of the first abstract paintings shown in Paris and was very different from popular art of the period, the public, on the whole, reacted negatively to it.

In the same year, he exhibited alongside his friends at the Salon of the Section d'Or and in , he was included in the Cubist room at the Salon des Independants. Kupka, however, did not wish to be associated with any particular artistic movement, commenting to a friend that "in the last Salon d'Automne I had a beautiful place of honor, unfortunately in the room with the Cubists with whom I am almost on a parallel.

It is with me as it was with Degas, who was classified as an Impressionist. His wife attempted to accompany the unit on their march to Picardy but after the first day she was arrested by the officer in charge and returned to Paris, she later travelled to the Front to see him. The artist returned to Puteaux with frostbite in his foot from standing in freezing water in the trenches and started to work again on paintings he had left behind.

After the war, many artists returned to figurative painting, Kupka was no exception and he reintegrated human figures into some of his work. He also became interested in machines and mechanization and incorporated these into his paintings. In , he had his first solo show in Paris at the Russian gallery, Galerie Povolozky. During these years, the Prague Academy appointed the artist as a Professor and it was Kupka's responsibility to introduce Czech scholarship students to French culture and art.

Although Kupka completed his book, Creation in the Plastic Arts in he struggled to find a publisher for it in Paris. It was eventually published in in Prague.