Art: Catching the Astral Plane

To French eyes, Frantisek Kupka was, for the last 20 years of his life, an ir relevance: a withered Czech emigre, with sunken cheeks and a disproportionately large appetite for food, who lived in a small cluttered house in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, surrounded by old abstract paintings that nobody wanted.

His much better-known colleague, the painter Jacques Villon, lived next door.

When collectors and dealers walked by their gate to call on Villon, Kupka and his mountainous wife Eugenie would peer through the shutters at them, too proud to show themselves. The collectors never stopped at the Kupkas’. In the past, they had been so poor that Eugenie Kupka now and then had to buy old tablecloths and underwear in the flea market, launder them and sell them to raise a few francs.

For a few years before his death in 1957 at the age of 86, Kupka was able to subsist on the sales of his work.

However, in those last years of the School of Paris, when French cultural chauvinism was quite as bloated as its American counterpart later became, Kupka labored under a distinct handicap: his obvious foreignness as an artist. His work looked, and in deed was, Northern rather than Mediterranean, full of theoretical obsessions, flights of mysticism, involuted decor, heavy symbolism and transcendental yearnings. There have been greater abstract artists than Kupka, but none so unmistakably Slavic. Later, when Kupka’s eminence as a pioneer of abstract art was recognized—his first completely abstract pictures were done around 1910-11—the French tried to claim him as a true Parisian in whom the Central European heritage was aesthetically unimportant.

Code of Shapes. This kind of nonsense only served to confuse Kupka’s image more, and so for most people he remains the least known of all the significant figures in early European modern ism. A full-dress retrospective was needed. Now it has come: 190 paintings, drawings and studies, opening this week at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

The show is the result of three years’ research by Art Historian Margit Rowell, whose catalogue—assisted with material from another student of Kupka’s art, Meda Mladek—becomes the definitive work so far on this little-known, uneven but (at best) engrossing artist.

Some painters carry a code of shapes, their handwriting, all their lives.

Kupka was one. Among the earliest paintings in this show is a dark still life, done around 1906, of a red cabbage plucked from the garden at Puteaux —leaf after exuberant leaf, dappled and veined, spiraling inward toward its round core. This system of forms crops up in painting after painting from Kupka’s maturity, like the large and magisterial Around a Point, 1925 (see color page). It carried for him a weight of symbolic associations that had to do with growth, movement and cosmic energy.

Since his youth, Kupka had been intensely interested in spiritualism; he was a frequent hiker on the astral plane.

“Yesterday,” he wrote to a friend in 1897, “I experienced a split consciousness where it seemed I was observing the earth from outside. I was in great empty space and saw the planets rolling quietly. After that it was difficult to come back to the trivia of everyday life . . .” The connection between such experiences—or hallucinations—and the airy spaces of his paintings, filled with rainbow arches and planet-like balls, is obvious. (He also liked to frequent the Paris Observatory.) Kupka’s belief in binding energy—a theosophical equivalent of Dante’s “Love which moves the Sun and the other stars”—could not be contained in everyday objects. “Alas,” he wrote, “nature is ever changing, rapid are its metamorphoses. The laws of physiology are beginning to be disseminated; Daguerre, the moving picture, reproduce more exactly what the most faithful realist painters attempted to give the world. The most skillful artist is absolutely incapable of capturing the life of nature with traditional means.”

It was a dilemma familiar to other artists of the 1900s: the crisis of hand made “reality” in an age of photography.

Like Marcel Duchamp, Villon and the futurists, Kupka seized the threat by the horns, using photographs to revise his practice as a painter. In a figure painting entitled Planes by Colors, Large Nude, 1909-10, Kupka had taken the un inhibited color of Fauvism and given it a dense, architectural solidity (it seems right that the model’s pose, monumental as it is, should mimic that of Michel angelo’s Leda). The problem was now to set those planes in motion; for that, Kupka resorted to one of the great novelties of the time, the high-speed sequential chronographs of pioneer Photographer Etienne-Jules Marcy—multiple exposures that bridged the gap between still photography and the movie cam era. His pastel studies of his wife picking flowers, done in this mode around 1909-10, are of extraordinary interest, preceding Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase by two years. Like wise, the paintings Kupka made later—a series of abstract color disks rotating in space—appear to have influenced Robert Delaunay’s disk paintings of 1913. At least Kupka believed so, and remained bitter about Delaunay till the end of his life. “Exhibit, why?” he demanded of a visitor to Puteaux in the ’50s. “So that everyone can copy you?”

Blue Triangle. There was a religious, or at least numinous basis to nearly all of Kupka’s imagery; even a strict geometrical abstraction like Untitled, 1931, retains in its big blue triangle a flicker of pointillist light that had been appearing in his work since he began studying the stained glass of Chartres.

Yet like the work of many another pioneer abstractionist with high spiritual ideals and an overoptimistic belief in the powers of art, Kupka’s painting remains somewhat hermetic—at least in terms of its declared ambitions. About his historical precedence, there is no doubt.

Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, 1912, was certainly the first abstract painting to be exhibited in Paris. Some of his big abstracts from the ’20s, like Around a Point, must be reckoned among the most imposing feats of modern art. And yet the fundamental subject of his work remains inaccessible. It is like hearing someone describe an LSD trip: the cosmic hoo-ha is all there, but the listener cannot experience it in the retelling. Deprived of the heavenly choir of theosophical documents, all too many of Kupka’s transcendental visions finish as pattern—not an ignoble fate, but less than he intended.

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