František Kupka

Of Czech origin, he was born in Bohemia in 1871 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His early works are in the symbolist vein of the late 19th century. In 1896, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, and mingled with other artists from Montparnasse. They lived in La Ruche, a residence that housed many immigrant artists, including Chagall and Brancusi, with whom exchanges were crucial for his work. In parallel to his work as a painter, he worked as a caricaturist for the newspapers L'Assiette au beurre. Kupka closely followed the work of Matisse, especially after the Salon d'Automne of 1905, where he discovered Matisse’s, Manguin’s, Vlaminck’s, Derain’s, Braque’s, and Marquet’s vivid color paintings. He then began to embrace the use of bright colors, not translating the true representation of the subject but working in broad strokes. Starting in 1909, after the publication of the first Futurist manifesto by poet Marinetti, he became interested in the decomposition of movement.

Around 1911, he grew closer to the Puteaux Group, which included Gleizes, Metzinger, Duchamp, and Picabia, who were interested in modern mechanics, movement, and speed, and wanted to exhibit without Picasso and Braque, representatives of Cubism. The rest of his art, resolutely abstract, revolves around his reflections on movement and the relationship between painting and music, in a style similar to Kandinsky’s. In 1912, he exhibited Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors at the Salon d'Automne, marking the birth of abstraction in France. For him, lines and colors were the essential units of painting. After the war, he continued with abstraction. He participated in many exhibitions on the Parisian art scene, as well as in New York at the 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at MoMA. He achieved significant success before his death in 1957 in Puteaux.