Painting: Bright Orpheus

In his long lifetime, Frank Kupka moved from painting Pre-Raphaelite madonnas, dress designing, and drawing anarchistic caricatures to luminous cauldrons of color (see opposite page); at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, he won a gold medal with a straightforward painting of two horses ridden by naked girls on a beach. That, and learned foot notes in art history books, have been the sum of his recognition until now. But two new shows in Paris, one by Dealer Louis Carré, who years ago bought scads of the artist’s works for peanuts, and another by the Galeríe Karl Flinker, reveal that Kupka thought through and defined abstractionism as early as anyone.

The Sound of Color. Kupka was 40 before he produced his first abstract paintings called Nocturne, Fugue in Red and Blue, and Warm Chromatic. Born in 1871 to a Bohemian village clerk in what is now Czechoslovakia, he began drawing statues in the town square, entered art school in Prague at the age of 16. He delighted in the new philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who exalted unconscious will and intuition over reason. He was entranced by their thought that music is the most abstract and therefore highest art — and decided to challenge it in paint.

As years passed, color rang in his work like chimes. His palette brightened past the impressionists, past the Fauves. Kupka frequently visited Chartres Cathedral, where he sat hour on hour soaking in the rainbow radiance of its stained-glass windows. He studied Newtonian color theory, and like Kandinsky, who was five years his senior, he quit coloring nature and began illustrating the nature of color. He wanted anything, he wrote, but “the postcard photograph.”

In 1913, Kupka gave his manifesto to a New York Times correspondent. “I have come to believe,” said he, “that it is not really the object of art to reproduce a subject photographically. Music is an art of sounds that are not in nature and almost entirely created. Man created writings, the airplane and the locomotive. Why may he not create in painting independently of the forms and colors of the world about him? The public certainly needs to add the action of the optic nerve to those of the olfactory, acoustic and sensory ones. I am still groping in the dark, but I believe I can produce a figure in colors as Bach has done in music.”

Bouncier than Bach. That poetic arbiter of artistic taste, Apollinaire, promptly dubbed Kupka’s work “Orphism,” and paired him with the French colorist Robert Delaunay. Although he rejected the association, Kupka churned out whorls of saturated color, dazzling fingerprints of the spectrum. With his paintpots, he set cubism on fire.

World War I put an end to Kupka’s optimistic colors. He fought in the French army, later returned to help establish independent Czechoslovakia. After the war, like Léger and the Dadaists, he painted imaginary machines in a commentary on dehumanized mankind. He did a series called Hot Jazz, trying to make his lyrical art more bouncy than Bach, but the verve of his youth seemed gone.

Orpheus had apparently looked backward. Kupka’s reputation became that of a faceless pioneer, and he seemed not to care. Shortly before his death seven years ago, Kupka received a visit from the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr Jr., who bought a batch of gouaches. “You have to thank her,” said Kupka, pointing to his wife. “Without her, all of this would have been burned.” Barr turned to Madame Kupka and kissed her.