František Kupka

A gift from the artist to his friend, the painter and engraver Pierre-Antoine Gallien; thence by descent to the previous owner 

Kupka settled in Paris in 1895 after completing his studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, earning his living in the French capital in his early years there as an illustrator for periodicals and journals, with a strong vein of social commentary running through his work. The stimulating environment of the French metropolis; the ferment of modern art in the city; and the artists and exhibitions travelling to it were all to inspire Kupka's painting greatly. From 1909 onwards, he increasingly turned away from capturing external reality towards espousing a radical simplification of pictorial composition that resonated deeply with internal realities of emotion, of instinct, and of the spiritual and with the cosmic and the cosmological. Kupka's paintings from the first two decades of the twentieth century most strongly demonstrate his interest in cosmology and in the interplay between the pictorial arts and music. Like Wassily Kandinsky, Kupka was an intellectual artist who strove for a conceptual basis for his art. He studied colour, optics, cosmology, physiology, biology, and anthropology, subjecting his studies to his aesthetic concerns. Although Kupka did not go perhaps as far as Wassily Kandinsky went in his exploration of the interplay between the visual and the aural (Kandinsky was, after all, a synaesthete for whom precise sounds such as a single note played on a violin conjured a vividly precise colour), the focus on colour and movement in Figure in a Landscape suggests that there is another sense-dimension at play.