František Kupka

Frantisek Kupka - First an apprenticeship as a saddler, then art studies

Frantisek Kupka was born in Opočno in Bohemia on 23 September 1871. A career as an artist was out of the question during his childhood and youth, which he himself described in retrospect as lonely and sad. Prompted by his father, Frantisek Kupka began an apprenticeship as a saddler at the age of thirteen, which he completed with a journeyman's certificate. Fortunately for him, the mayor of Dobruška, where the Kupka family lived at the time, had noticed the artistic talent of the solitary boy and advocated for Frantisek to be allowed to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Although he quickly became one of the most talented students there, he suffered great economic hardship and had to work as a tutor and spiritualist medium alongside his studies in order to pay his way. Despite these adversities, Frantisek Kupka was able to complete his studies in Prague and take further lessons from August Eisenmenger at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. 

A maverick in the Parisian art world too

In Vienna, Frantisek Kupka also sought instruction from the painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, who encouraged him to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. With his early working tending towards Art Nouveau and Symbolism, Kupka's monumental history painting Heinrich Heine'sDeath Dream, a commission for the Vienna Kunstverein, was his first major success. His move to Paris in the spring of 1896 soon brought a new artistic orientation. The solitary Kupka kept his distance from the Parisian art scene, but followed the new paths of the Neo-Impressionists while earning his living as a religious studies teacher and fashion illustrator - and as a caricaturist, as his satirical drawings, which appeared in illustrated weekly magazines from 1900 onwards, reached an ever-growing audience. Together with fellow Czech painter Alfons Mucha, Frantisek Kupka took part in the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900. The Manifesto of Futurism by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published in the magazine Le Figaro in 1909, exerted the greatest influence on his artistic development.

Little recognition for the courage to abstract

Frantisek Kupka was the first painter in France to stop describing reality and venture into abstraction. The optical colour studies of Isaac Newton inspired him to conduct various colour experiments, which are summarised in the cycle The Newton Discs. His encounters with painters such as Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger encouraged Kupka on his new course, even if the winds of criticism blew against him at times and his new ideas were not always met with understanding. Kupka was not widely recognised during his lifetime and the artist spent his last years in loneliness and bitterness. Today, his painting Amorpha. Fugue in Two Colours is considered a milestone in art history; however, the proximity to Cubism, which is often attributed to him, cannot be maintained on closer inspection. Colour and the archaic were the defining elements of Frantisek Kupka's understanding of art.

Frantisek Kupka died in Puteaux near Paris on 21 or 24 June 1957.