The opening in Paris, late last November, of an exhibition devoted to the Czechoslovak painter Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) looked like a sly wink of destiny to some of us. Not only was the French public belatedly discovering an artist whose true importance (on a par with Kandinsky or Mondrian) had been consistently underestimated until now, but Czechoslovakia itself, at the very same time, was casting off its former masters and revealing itself to be what writers like Kundra have stubbornly been asserting for decades--an unalienable part of the European world and tradition. And so the lobotomization of Europe may finally be ending in all areas--political, of course, but cultural too.
For just as one has been tempted, over the past forty years, to write the history of Europe as though the nations and cultures beyond the Iron Curtain did not really count, so too has one written the history of art by conveniently ignoring artists who failed to fit into the Procrustean bed of orthodox Western art theory--because the "really important" things were happening in our part of the world. The new situation makes us considerably richer by encouraging us to acknowledge the tangible complexities and contradictions of the real world.
The important, three-hundred-item retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris offered an unprecedented opportunity to discover Kupka's peculiar originality, along with the striking diversity of his work--which can be read as the response of a highly gifted and intuitive man and a major artist to the tremendous and disturbing spiritual mutations that marked his time. He was, in turn and sometimes simultaneously, a Symbolist, a rather humorous Fauvist, a political cartoonist, a painter of works that to a considerable extent followed the Futurist lead, an Orphist of sorts, one of the founding fathers of abstraction (in the same year as, and independently from, Kandinsky), a "machinist" painter, and a member of the Abstraction-Creation group in Paris.
The story of Kupka's development reveals some of the threads of his complex nature. As a child, he learned to draw under his father's guidance and was a precociously gifted draftsman. A poor student, on the other hand, he left school at the age of thirteen to become a saddler's apprentice.
Five years later, he enrolled in the case of the Nazarene painter Frantisek Sequens at the Prague School of Fine Arts. He pursued his studies there while earning his living as, of all things, a spirit medium. Both his attachment to Sequens, whose conception of art was, even then, regarded as a bit dated, and his involvement with the spirit world are significant. Sequens' Nazarene doctrine held that artists should deal with poetic and philosophical themes--and the deeper seriousness that such an approach could imply remained throughout his lifetime. Art, to him, was a spiritual calling.
But Kupka's concern with spiritism and occultism also arose out of his conviction that the world was ruled by spiritual forces that an artist as such might also grasp. His convictions in this area were oddly, but not surprisingly, tinged with the scientism of his day; the development of the radio and the X-ray and the realization that the visible world was also governed by invisible but not immaterial forces (electromagnetism, for instance) encouraged Kupka to understand spiritual forces as somehow belonging to that same class. He believed in telepathy (which, in his
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