Arguably the first artist to present fully abstract pictures in the modern era, František Kupka stands among giants of the twentieth century like Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian who revolutionized the canon of art history through new pictorial modes. A masterpiece of abstraction, Kupka’s commanding Formes flasques from 1919-25 arises from the zenith of his oeuvre, when the artist’s compositions come to wholly express the sum of his aesthetic philosophies.

Born in Bohemia in 1871, Kupka spent his youth wandering under the auspices of various religious organizations and local benefactors, from the Capuchin monastery to which he ran as a boy, to the spiritualist tradesmen like Josef Šiška and the progressive Mayor Archleb who encouraged his early artistic talent. Such creative inclinations and a sense of the divine were intertwined in Kupka’s consciousness from a young age. It was this association which would inform his convictions throughout his career as an artist.

The supportive Bohemian environment fostered the burgeoning artist’s talents and afforded him the opportunity to study under the director of the School for Crafts in Jaroměr, and later the Prague School of Fine Arts. In Prague, Kupka excelled in his studies (though he found them lacking in rigor) and grew increasingly interested in the occult, even becoming a medium. A heady mix of spiritualism and bouts of alcoholism invited psychological torment and he soon left Prague for Vienna, hoping to study at the Academy of Fine Arts and resolve his mental anguish.

In Vienna, Kupka’s self-directed studies involved reading Dante, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Plato and the Vedas, dabbling in various streams of spirituality and absorbing the latest scientific studies as well as treatises on alchemy and astrology. Kupka’s engagement with Theosophy brought him into contact with Karl Diefenbach, the influential painter-philosopher at whose commune Kupka would stay for many months in 1892. In addition to the daily activities at Diefenbach’s, including ‘air baths’ and nude exercise, deep conversations analogizing music and painting ensued—theories which would serve as a basis for much of Kupka’s later work.

Though few paintings were created during this period of intellectual inquiry, the exposure to multifarious philosophies and religious practitioners began to inform a new conceptual framework for Kupka's practice. His letters from this period to his friend and future art critic, Arthur Roessler, reveal a growing confidence in his artistic assertions, namely that “a ‘subject’ is unnecessary in painting, that one can experience a great joy just in seeing colors and lines,” and goes on to write of “‘spots of color and lines moving in his head,’” and signs such letters "color symphonist" (ibid., p. 26).

Unmoved by the prospect of leading an academic existence in Vienna, Kupka continued his peripatetic ways; by 1896, he’d landed in Paris, the epicenter of the avant-garde. His first years in the French capital were impecunious as he took sporadic classes at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian, eking out a living through his illustrations for cabaret posters and fashion magazines. His connections in Montmartre eventually paved the way for regular contributions to numerous magazines and book commissions, affording him some measure of financial stability.

Executed in 1919-25, Formes flasques takes as a point of departure one such book project. Under the pseudonym 'Paul Regnard,' Kupka illustrated the eleventh-century epic, La Chanson de Roland featuring a battle scene with the namesake protagonist and his horse set against a radiant horizon of pink, purple and yellow hues—the patterning of which finds resonance in the compositional and chromatic balance of the present work (see fig. 1). While his commercial work was largely figurative, his artistic practice was by this time avowedly abstract and increasingly powerful.

Indeed, masterworks like Formes flasques capture a sense of cosmic grandeur, the arabesque forms seemingly expanding and contracting at the behest of a greater, all-consuming gravitational force. Through entirely plastic means, Kupka leads the viewer to believe that there must exist, whether in nature or supernature, some omnipotent force at play. These works, endowed with a sense of ceaseless motion and euphoric reverie, prove the terrestrial manifestation of a higher reality—the representation of which, Kupka asserts, is unachievable through mere mimesis.

The centrifugal pattern at the heart of Formes flasques echoes those of Kupka’s early forays into pure abstraction which he first presented at the seminal Salon de la Section d'Or exhibition in 1912 (see fig. 2). The mature works from the 1920s like Formes flasques, however, exhibit a heightened sensitivity to light, color and dimension informed by a decade’s worth of artistic and philosophical investigation.

By the time the present work was completed, Kupka’s manifold interests in spirituality, science and the arts had coalesced into a treatise written before the war and at last published in Czech in 1923. Excerpts from the later French translation of Kupka’s essay, La Création dans les arts plastiques, reveals how the role of the scientific world—just as much as the metaphysical one—cannot be overstated in the artist’s creative practice. Kupka once proclaimed, “I cannot understand a modern painter who is unable to use at least a telescope and a microscope” (Exh. Cat, The Dallas Museum of Art (and traveling), Painting the Universe, František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, 1997-98, p. 155).

Indeed it was his investigation of matter under the microscope which, like his spirituality, informed the artist of realities not seen by the naked eye. As Pierre Brullé and Marketa Theinhardt write: “According to Kupka one must distinguish the sphere of artistic vision and the sphere of the observation of nature, relevant to science. Kupka stresses that in nature everything is in motion." They go on to quote the artist, who stated that "'starting, for instance, from the principle of microscopic observation, we establish that all living matter is in motion: in a hand which for a moment seems motionless, blood circulates from one cell to another, molecules revolve around one another, the vibrating air all around cannot leave the surface motionless, as it appears to our untutored eye'" (ibid. p. 159).

Kupka’s keen attunement to scientific and technological discoveries of his day, including the advent of chronophotography and X-rays, directly influenced his compositional aesthetic. Pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge and expanded upon by Étienne-Jules Marey, chronophotography was a revolutionary imaging process that allowed the photographer to capture a sense of motion through photographic stills, serving as a basis for the development of cinematography (see fig. 3).

As it did for the Cubists and Futurists, the appearance of motion and simultaneity illuminated through mechanical means proved a monumental aesthetic influence. However, Kupka’s perpetual disavowal of any “ism,” and his specific dismissal of Futurism as too imitative, and Cubism as too static, led his vein of abstraction in an independent direction (see figs. 4-6).

As Margit Rowell describes, Kupka “found the conceptual basis of Cubism incompatible with the abstract concepts which he understood as the real content of art. Formally it was inappropriate as well. Cubism was static, monochromatic, flat and spatially restricted, a distortion of perceptual reality based on a sum of rational or pictorially logical choices. However Kupka's vision was one of constant change, which implied dynamic rhythms, arbitrary color, undetermined space. Abstraction would be Kupka's alternative to Cubism: a translation of his vision into pure rhythmic forms and colors” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Kunsthaus Zürich, František Kupka, 1871-1957, A Retrospective, 1975-76, p. 49).

It is a great irony that the legacy of a painter, whose aim was to represent truth through abstraction, would endure as a leader of Orphism—a movement whose moniker Kupka viewed as reductive and facile, if not fallacious.

While Kupka’s works were, especially in the early years after the Section d’Or exhibition, frequently hung alongside fellow masters of color, Robert and Sonia Delaunay (see figs. 7-9)—who in turn viewed themselves as the founders of Simultaneism—"Kupka was never satisfied with the Orphic designation” as Rowell asserts. “He expressed his displeasure on many occasions, explaining that a comparison of his work with music was an extreme simplification, and solely based on the inclusion of musical terms in his titles... In Kupka's case, the musical terms were intended to discourage the viewer from looking for literal subject matter and stimulate him to consider chromatic and structural rhythms alone… it shows analogies with Mondrian and Kandinsky in its reference to a cosmic order” (ibid., pp. 79-80; see figs. 10 and 11).

In 1946, Formes flasques was exhibited at the first ever large-scale retrospective of Kupka's work. Held at the Galerie S.V.U. Mánes in Prague, a venue establish by the Mánes artist association to which he belonged, this exhibition marked a pivotal moment in Kupka's career, drawing international attention to the breadth and caliber of the Czech artist's work. Of the nearly 50 paintings by Kupka in Prague's National Gallery today, nearly all were acquired from the artist following this exhibition. In recent years, Kupka's works have garnered increasing critical acclaim and commercial success, with exhibitions like The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 2024-25 exhibition Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 presenting the artist's immense contributions to Modern Art to broader audiences.

Held in the Hazen family collection for nearly 60 years and largely unseen in public since, Formes flasques shows Kupka at his absolute pinnacle and presents a composition whose bravura harmony of light, color and form expresses a higher reality through purely abstract means.

Artist

František Kupka