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Lot Essay
In October 1913, The New York Times ran a short profile on the Czech émigré artist František Kupka, who was then living in Paris. “I have come to believe that it is not really the object of art to reproduce a subject photographically…” he explained to the journalist of his recent work. “To become conscious of the employment of pictorial agents without the slavery of the descriptive in painting has become the object of my efforts… I am still groping in the dark, but I believe I can find something” (“‘Orpheism’ Latest of Painting Cults” in The New York Times, 19 October 1913, p. 36). This modest statement belies Kupka’s position as one of the leading pioneers of abstraction during the opening decades of the twentieth century—in 1912, he had exhibited his ground-breaking composition Amorpha, fugue à deux couleurs (Vachtová, no. 139; Národní Galerie, Prague) at the Salon d’Automne, the first time a purely abstract work of art had ever been shown publicly in Paris. This landmark event catapulted Kupka to the very forefront of the European avant-garde, announcing him as one of the most advanced artists and thinkers of the modern movement.
However, the First World War brought an abrupt halt to Kupka’s painterly work. He voluntarily enlisted in the French army and was swiftly deployed to the front lines, where he fought at the Battle of the Somme, before illness forced a return to Paris. Through the ensuing years he busied himself with organizing the city’s Czech volunteers and produced anti-German propaganda. It was only following the end of the conflict that Kupka re-immersed himself in his paintings once again, revisiting many of the themes and ideas that had occupied his imagination before the war, testing their resonance and potential for further study. At the same time, he came to an agreement with the faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, which granted him a special professorship, allowing him to remain in Paris, where he would host and supervise Czech scholarship students during their time in the city. This arrangement provided Kupka with a crucial sense of financial security, enabling him to eschew contemporary trends and fashions, and instead boldly forge ahead with his highly experimental abstract language, independently.
Une Pensée is a captivating, lyrical example of Kupka’s visionary style, begun during this highly creative period of his career in the 1920s. The composition is dominated by a series of sweeping arcs of color, executed in shades of gold, violet and blue, that stretch upwards in slender, vertiginous loops. For Kupka, such verticality invoked the symbolic meaning of reaching for “luminous heights”—“Profound and silent, a vertical plane helps the whole concept of space to emerge,” he wrote (quoted in František Kupka, 1871-1957: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, p. 188). Here, there is a delicate sense of rhythm and balance to the forms as they cascade across the canvas, the subtle variations in color and texture between each element allowing various aspects of the composition to recede or project from the picture plane, creating an intriguing sense of depth and dimensionality within the multi-layered composition.
While determinedly abstract, the repetitive, looping arch motif in Une Pensée appears to echo the essential structures of the great Gothic cathedrals of France. Ever since he first moved to Paris, Kupka had been fascinated by the powerful, soaring interiors, dramatic architecture, and famed stained glass windows of the Medieval churches he discovered on his wanderings through the city, an interest he shared with fellow Orphist painter, Robert Delaunay.
Kupka was particularly interested in the manner in which light passing through the colored panes of these intricately designed windows could be transformed by their jewel tones, becoming free-floating passages of color, that flickered and moved against the surrounding stone as the viewer passed through the space. He described the “vertiginous musicality of color” of the windows in the churches of Saint-Germain-L’Auxerrois and Notre-Dame, and throughout the 1920s brought his students to Chartres Cathedral, where, as they remembered, they would spend the entire day, studying the colored windows on the basis of Kupka’s notes (quoted in Frank Kupka, exh. cat., Cologne, 1981, p. 71). He even went so far as to install a stained glass window in a corner of his own studio, which allowed him to study the process first hand. In Une Pensée, the detailing of the overlapping planes of purple and blue at the center of the composition seem to channel these experiences into the painting, the rippling, refracted play of color and transparency of the planes recalling light passing through glass.
Kupka’s working method was complex, each painting the culmination of a lengthy process of evolution and maturation. He often spent several years working on a composition, testing different variations, and musing over his subject at length, before reaching a pictorial conclusion. As a photograph of the artist’s studio in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux around 1933 illustrates, he often worked simultaneously on various cycles of paintings whose themes he would follow until they exhausted themselves or developed in other directions. Kupka also frequently returned to older works that remained in his studio—after meditating on their play of forms, he would take his brush to the canvas and explore a new train of thought, tracing different lines of energy or enhancing a certain form. For example, his vast, two-meter-square painting Autour d’un point (Vachtová, no. 149), now in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, is dated 1911-1930. While its origins and style derive from the first years of Kupka’s embrace of abstraction, he continued to work on it at different intervals through the following twenty years, until finally completing it in 1934. As a result, its date reflects both its conceptual origins and the time of its conceptual completion, rather than the various points at which Kupka put brush to canvas.
In the case of Une Pensée, the painting was reworked by the artist at some point in its history, most likely incorporating new details and elements that Kupka felt would enhance the pictorial effect. While the interplay of the warm yellow tones with cool blues and violets has precedence in works such as Ordonnance sur verticales en jaune of 1912-1913 (Vachtová, no. 161; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), the central pairing of looping arcs with the refracted, overlapping planes of color are visually rooted in Kupka’s work from the mid-1920s, and find close correlation with another painting from the same year, Composition, Pensée I (Private collection). The horizontal progression of flat, rectangular planes in the lower portion of the canvas, meanwhile, are closely aligned with the geometric language he explored a decade later, as seen in works such as Mesure du temps II (Vachtová, no. 184; The Batliner Collection), which has been dated circa 1934.
Executed in a range of subtly shifting golden tones, the regularly spaced rectangles in Une Pensée have been compared by Ludmila Vachtová to a film-reel, which passes through the space of the painting, before continuing on outside its borders, ad infinitum (op. cit., 1968, p. 283). The gentle gradation of pigment from one plane to the next encourages the viewer’s eye to move from left to right as they follow their progression, offering a powerful visual contrast to the upward thrust of the vertical, arcing lines above. The painting remained with the artist until his death, and subsequently passed to the artist’s widow, Eugénie Kupka. It was later purchased by the Saltzmans in 1980.
However, the First World War brought an abrupt halt to Kupka’s painterly work. He voluntarily enlisted in the French army and was swiftly deployed to the front lines, where he fought at the Battle of the Somme, before illness forced a return to Paris. Through the ensuing years he busied himself with organizing the city’s Czech volunteers and produced anti-German propaganda. It was only following the end of the conflict that Kupka re-immersed himself in his paintings once again, revisiting many of the themes and ideas that had occupied his imagination before the war, testing their resonance and potential for further study. At the same time, he came to an agreement with the faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, which granted him a special professorship, allowing him to remain in Paris, where he would host and supervise Czech scholarship students during their time in the city. This arrangement provided Kupka with a crucial sense of financial security, enabling him to eschew contemporary trends and fashions, and instead boldly forge ahead with his highly experimental abstract language, independently.
Une Pensée is a captivating, lyrical example of Kupka’s visionary style, begun during this highly creative period of his career in the 1920s. The composition is dominated by a series of sweeping arcs of color, executed in shades of gold, violet and blue, that stretch upwards in slender, vertiginous loops. For Kupka, such verticality invoked the symbolic meaning of reaching for “luminous heights”—“Profound and silent, a vertical plane helps the whole concept of space to emerge,” he wrote (quoted in František Kupka, 1871-1957: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, p. 188). Here, there is a delicate sense of rhythm and balance to the forms as they cascade across the canvas, the subtle variations in color and texture between each element allowing various aspects of the composition to recede or project from the picture plane, creating an intriguing sense of depth and dimensionality within the multi-layered composition.
While determinedly abstract, the repetitive, looping arch motif in Une Pensée appears to echo the essential structures of the great Gothic cathedrals of France. Ever since he first moved to Paris, Kupka had been fascinated by the powerful, soaring interiors, dramatic architecture, and famed stained glass windows of the Medieval churches he discovered on his wanderings through the city, an interest he shared with fellow Orphist painter, Robert Delaunay.
Kupka was particularly interested in the manner in which light passing through the colored panes of these intricately designed windows could be transformed by their jewel tones, becoming free-floating passages of color, that flickered and moved against the surrounding stone as the viewer passed through the space. He described the “vertiginous musicality of color” of the windows in the churches of Saint-Germain-L’Auxerrois and Notre-Dame, and throughout the 1920s brought his students to Chartres Cathedral, where, as they remembered, they would spend the entire day, studying the colored windows on the basis of Kupka’s notes (quoted in Frank Kupka, exh. cat., Cologne, 1981, p. 71). He even went so far as to install a stained glass window in a corner of his own studio, which allowed him to study the process first hand. In Une Pensée, the detailing of the overlapping planes of purple and blue at the center of the composition seem to channel these experiences into the painting, the rippling, refracted play of color and transparency of the planes recalling light passing through glass.
Kupka’s working method was complex, each painting the culmination of a lengthy process of evolution and maturation. He often spent several years working on a composition, testing different variations, and musing over his subject at length, before reaching a pictorial conclusion. As a photograph of the artist’s studio in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux around 1933 illustrates, he often worked simultaneously on various cycles of paintings whose themes he would follow until they exhausted themselves or developed in other directions. Kupka also frequently returned to older works that remained in his studio—after meditating on their play of forms, he would take his brush to the canvas and explore a new train of thought, tracing different lines of energy or enhancing a certain form. For example, his vast, two-meter-square painting Autour d’un point (Vachtová, no. 149), now in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, is dated 1911-1930. While its origins and style derive from the first years of Kupka’s embrace of abstraction, he continued to work on it at different intervals through the following twenty years, until finally completing it in 1934. As a result, its date reflects both its conceptual origins and the time of its conceptual completion, rather than the various points at which Kupka put brush to canvas.
In the case of Une Pensée, the painting was reworked by the artist at some point in its history, most likely incorporating new details and elements that Kupka felt would enhance the pictorial effect. While the interplay of the warm yellow tones with cool blues and violets has precedence in works such as Ordonnance sur verticales en jaune of 1912-1913 (Vachtová, no. 161; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris), the central pairing of looping arcs with the refracted, overlapping planes of color are visually rooted in Kupka’s work from the mid-1920s, and find close correlation with another painting from the same year, Composition, Pensée I (Private collection). The horizontal progression of flat, rectangular planes in the lower portion of the canvas, meanwhile, are closely aligned with the geometric language he explored a decade later, as seen in works such as Mesure du temps II (Vachtová, no. 184; The Batliner Collection), which has been dated circa 1934.
Executed in a range of subtly shifting golden tones, the regularly spaced rectangles in Une Pensée have been compared by Ludmila Vachtová to a film-reel, which passes through the space of the painting, before continuing on outside its borders, ad infinitum (op. cit., 1968, p. 283). The gentle gradation of pigment from one plane to the next encourages the viewer’s eye to move from left to right as they follow their progression, offering a powerful visual contrast to the upward thrust of the vertical, arcing lines above. The painting remained with the artist until his death, and subsequently passed to the artist’s widow, Eugénie Kupka. It was later purchased by the Saltzmans in 1980.