The outstanding Czech artist František Kupka (1871-1957) went from symbolism to complete abstraction. Along with painting, he was also a medium and could transmit signals from the other world to Parisians: some individual words and phrases of their deceased loved ones. It is believed that the young painter had contact with the subtle world and this was reflected in his original canvases.
Bad start
Frantisek Kupka was born in 1871 in the Bohemian town of Opoczno into a saddlery family. He showed early drawing talent and dreamed of entering the Roman Academy of Arts, but was refused. His petition was written in French: "Refuse, because Czech." The insult remained with the artist for life.
Unsuccessful, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where the genre of symbolist and allegorical painting flourished. The professors instilled in him a deep interest in antiquity, and he began to illustrate Greek myths. Then Kupka went to France and studied for some time at Julian's private academy.
In Paris, Kupka became a member of the community of Czech artists who called themselves “Czechs-Parisians”. They lived very poorly and often shared one loaf for 10 people. Parisian Czechs often gathered at Madame Charlotte's cafe, where they debated the essence of painting. Kupka rarely left Paris, but in his life there was a mysterious trip to Sweden (according to one version, he met great love there), and the artist saw the landscapes of Scandinavia and the northern sky, which made a strong impression on him.
Social evil critic
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In the early 1890s, Kupka became close to satirical artists and introduced an element of "biomorphic fiction" into French socio-political satire: he represented social evil in the form of non-existent monsters composed of parts of the bodies of different animals.
The knowledge of legends and chilling stories about anomalous phenomena accumulated by the artist became the reason for the emergence of drawings and paintings on which the kingdom of many-headed monsters unfolded. They made an eerie impression. The artist was well versed in mythology, and the monsters he painted looked very natural.
The people who inhabited the fictional kingdom of Kupka were completely helpless in the clutches of monsters. The young painter had an excellent school, and the people he depicted are drawn so carefully, as if he was painting a life-like academic picture, and not creating a social caricature. This was unusual, because most of the cartoonists reflected the vices of society through ordinary everyday scenes. The satirist with the soul of a science fiction writer attracted attention to himself.
Kupka actively combined mythology with a social theme. He was one of the first to raise the topic of prostitution in his works. On the streets of Paris, he met teenage girls who were forced to go to the panel out of poverty, and the artist did not regret the satirical colors to depict those who used the services of young harlots. Images of fantastic animals helped him again in this. A whole gallery of freaks appeared on the pages of magazines, pulling ugly claws to young creatures.
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understood early that a professional of the highest class had entered the magazine satire, and began to think how to "neutralize" him. The artist was invited to a bourgeois family, treated kindly and showered with honors and prestigious orders. Soon the social satire in his work became softer.
But the image of the ugly predator capitalist has become entrenched in the world vanguard.
The artist lost his satirical attitude only after meeting the famous French geographer and popularizer of science Elise Reclus (1830-1905), who commissioned him a cycle of illustrations for the multivolume editions "Man and Earth" and "Earth and People" (thanks to the Russian translation of these books, graphic Kupka's works became famous in Russia). The young painter became interested in ethnography, geology and astronomy and moved away from social satire.
Painter or medium?
The turn of the century was the era of seances, and Kupka, in the mid-1880s, learned from one of his father's acquaintances (a craftsman who made saddles) that there were rituals of communication with the souls of the dead. It is possible that in childhood he was present at the performance of such rituals in his homeland.
While in France, Kupka unexpectedly showed the ability of a medium. It is still unknown how his abilities were revealed and who in Paris drew attention to the artist's mediumship. However, already in the mid-1890s, he had a reputation as a person who can come into contact with the soul of the deceased. Rumors about a talented Czech, who knew how to "enter the subtle world" and talk with the dead, spread throughout Paris.
According to contemporaries, he knew how to plunge into a state of trance and speak in other people's voices. Residents of Paris, who asked the artist to talk to their deceased relatives, heard in Kupka's words details and details of life, which the medium could not learn from anyone but from the deceased themselves. Moreover, they recognized the voices of the dead. In a short time, the young painter won the authority of a real medium and could have continued to practice as a spirit, but he did not. Quitting painting was beyond his strength.
It can be assumed that Kupka was introduced to the Spiritualists by the largest Czech symbolist artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), who designed furniture for seances, including the famous revolving tables for invoking spirits. They were so good that Mucha began to receive orders for the design of entire interiors of rooms intended for communication with spirits. Kupka saw these interiors, but he did not make furniture for communicating with spirits himself - they expected the services of a medium from him.
Fly and Kupka were friends, and the subtle world, images of spirits and disembodied beings were reflected in the work of both artists. They started a mystical theme in Czech art. In 1936, a joint exhibition of two talented Czechs took place in Prague: their work gradually returned to their homeland.
Friendship with the avant-garde
While living in France, Kupka settled in the city of Puteaux, and his neighbors were the famous avant-garde brothers Duchamp (Raymond, Gaston and Marseille). A friendship began, and the most fruitful contacts were between Kupka and one of the brothers - Marcel (1887-1968). This friendship turned out to be mutually enriching. Kupka told his colleagues a lot about magic, mysticism and anomalous phenomena, and Duchamp listened willingly to these stories.
However, Duchamp did not imitate Kupka's biomorphic constructions and did not get carried away by the topic of biological deformity. He took from a colleague the idea of an astral and etheric body, a mystical aura and, on the recommendation of his Czech friend, read the works of Helena Blavatsky, and perhaps other theorists of spiritualism. Blavatsky described the subtle world in her books, and Duchamp liked the idea of the existence of this world next to the material world. This could not but affect his painting: the artist began to depict objects shrouded in some kind of cloudy environment.
Not without the influence of Kupka, Duchamp wrote in 1912 and in 1913 exhibited his most controversial canvas in New York, Nude Descending the Staircase. Walking up the stairs, the depicted heroine leaves on each step some shreds of energy clouds, sheaves of light and clots of energy. Because of this, instead of one of its figures, several bodies "deformed by the environment" are depicted at once. The traditional outline of the figure is impossible to distinguish. This immediately caused a flurry of indignation, but no one had any idea that the image was created under the influence of the ideas of Helena Blavatsky, which his Czech colleague told Duchamp about.
The founder of the space theme
Thanks to Elise Reclus, Kupka got in touch with the world of planetariums and astronomical museums. He had a mandate to visit any observatories, planetariums, and museums related to the astronomical topic free of charge. Entering the Astronomical Museum of the city of Ghent, he saw one exhibit that amazed him. In the museum showcase lay … a handful of sand. From the explanatory text, the artist understood that this is a model of the lunar soil, created in terrestrial conditions on the basis of astronomical observations of the Moon. He was shocked by what he saw and decided to create a cycle of works dedicated to the moon and sunlight. They were very different from the illustrations in astronomy textbooks. It is possible that these canvases associated with the sky were purely abstract thanks to Kupka's acquaintance with the great Russian avant-garde artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Interested in space, Kupka enthusiastically welcomed the appearance in Italy of manifestos of futuristic art. He liked the beauty of speeds and the cosmic scale of the image of the world, for which the futurists stood up. It is safe to say that Kupka was one of the founders of the space theme in painting. After the first works on the theme of the sky, he no longer returned to the world of monsters and mythological dreams. The theme of the infinity of the Universe, the images of rays and clouds, as well as the dispersion of light to the end of his life captured his heart.
Space paintings of Kupka are distinguished by exquisite colors. These extraordinarily beautiful oil paintings are reminiscent of images taken in the 1960s and 1970s from satellites and space stations. The artist seemed to have been in space. He miraculously foresaw the color and light effects of space photography and video filming.
Kupka died in 1957, several months before the launch of the world's first artificial Earth satellite. It is significant that the very first color photographs taken in space resembled the canvases of futurists and abstractionists, and above all - of a painter from the city of Opoczno.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №43, Andrey Dyachenko