Orphism: Kupka and Delaunay Lead a Modern Reawakening
When the Salon d’Automne opened at the Grand Palais in 1912, Salle XI was again the source of fascination, consternation and—for some—ire. Alongside artists such as Francis Picabia, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger, a large canvas of spare, curvilinear motion-swept forms dominated the room. Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs was František Kupka’s first publicly exhibited work of pure abstraction (see fig 1). From this moment, the trajectory of art history began anew.
“In 1912, two important paintings were exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne: La Fugue en deux couleurs and La Chromatique chaude. As had happened so frequently with other masterpieces in the past, they were greeted with incomprehension and derision. The senior member of the Conseil Municipal of Paris lodged an official protest, and a deputy seconded him with a motion in Parliament. Neither of them realized that Frank Kupka, a Czech who had lived in Paris since 1894, had created in these two masterpieces what we call modern art, the art of our t.mes .”
The rupture of Impressionism against the traditional Parisian Salon was firmly in the past. Indeed, Impressionist art was viewed by many as the now-traditional art of France. Its makers, mostly French citizens, no longer shocked the public and the establishment with the inclusion in their paintings of locomotives in the countryside or their desire to capture effects of light and atmosphere. What was shocking in the first decade of the twentieth century was the increasing use of non-naturalistic color, begun by the Neo-Impressionists and furthered by the Fauves, and the breakdown of form engendered by the Cubists as pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso (see fig. 2). In this setting, Kupka’s monumental Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs towering over sculptures by Modigliani and near paintings by Léger, Picabia and Jean Metzinger, served as a tangential association of the artist with the Cubists while also positioning him at the center of an unfolding crisis around the meaning of French art in the early twentieth century.
Kupka himself defied classification. By the t.mes his pure abstractions were roiling the art viewing public in 1912, Kupka was in his early forties and had already moved through various modes of artistic expression. Among the only constants were his firm rejection of the “isms” of his day. He eschewed association with any singular movement or category and rejected critics’ equivalence to Cubism and Futurism. Kupka appreciated the appellation of ‘Orphism’ only insofar as it conjured the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, and not, as the Guillaume Apollinaire-coined term connoted, a mere differentiation from the monochromes of Picasso and Braque with an emphasis on musicality.
The painter and autodidact, who also considered himself a spiritual medium, held a life-long affinity for Hellenistic culture and philosophy. Thus, Orphism and its namesake—the mythical musician-cum-prophet Orpheus—proved, in a very specific and profound sense, an apt affiliation for Kupka, who would later be championed as leader of the movement, alongside Sonia and Robert Delaunay (see fig. 3).
As his work moved deeper into the realm of pure abstraction in the ensuing decades, Kupka grew increasingly estranged from fellow artists, working out his philosophical inquiries and pictorial investigations through writing rather than discussion. This deeply personal process led the artist to revisit and even rework compositions over a period of years, even decades.
“There are men among us, geniuses, who appear to have been chosen by destiny to overthrow those clay statues which we took for marble.”
Kupka’s rhapsodic Flux et reflux belongs to a limited suite of five related compositions, the dating of which roughly spans from 1913 to 1924 (see below). Each of these works—all of which, excepting the present composition, are titled Traits, plans et profondeur—features vibrant panes of blue and violet accentuated by green radiating outward and framed by labyrinthine black contours. The effect is one of ecstatic rapture and immense beauty, with the pictorial allusion to stained-glass only furthering a sense of the numinous and divine. Of the series, Flux et reflux is one of only two paintings remaining in private hands and the only composition differentiated by its uniquely horizontal format. Though the dating ascribed to this suite of works has shifted slightly over t.mes , it is clear that in these paintings, Kupka draws immense inspiration from both the natural and man-made worlds, harnessing the power of this duality to represent a truth grander and more cosmic than either realm alone.
In the catalogue for The Solomon R. Guggenheim’s 1975 retrospective on the artist, the series is described accordingly: “Five paintings on this theme are known today. The earliest version [Centre Pompidou, Paris] is the most heavily painted and emphasizes a biological inspiration. Indeed, in its brooding blues, purples, blacks and grays, it evokes a species of marine flora. A second version [Národní Galerie, Prague] shows the same dense brushwork and tonalities. In contrast to these, three somewhat later versions (probably 1920-23) in their transparency of color and overlapping forms, no longer call to mind biological life, but an ephemeral shifting of light through panes of glass. Kupka had a carved wooden panel in his studio, cut out and glazed with a similar stylized floral motif. The backdrop for these panes was a rich resonant blue which filtered through the glass in different azure tones. Although Kupka's painting once again depicts rotation, even arterial circulation, and refers distantly to organic life, this openwork panel in Kupka's house was obviously one of several sources of inspiration for the final pictorial idea” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, František Kupka, 1871-1957, A Retrospective, 1975, p. 236).
As Meda Mladek describes, “Kupka was intensely interested in stained glass. His lasting interest in color penetrated by light led him to install a stained glass window in a corner of his studio soon after moving to his own house in 1906. It remained there until his death. A Czech critic, after discussing Orphism with Kupka, stated that the two stained glass windows in Notre Dame were the probable inspiration for Kupka's first Orphic experiments in 1911. Kupka himself described the ‘vertiginous musicality of color’ of the Saint Germain L'Auxerrois and Notre Dame windows in his book. He often visited Chartres with his students, where, as they remembered, they would spend the entire day, borrow a ladder and study the colored windows on the basis of Kupka's notes….. Kupka loved the mystical, continuous light of stained glass and used to show his students the uselessness of the details added in black on the glass surface. His desire to capture the ‘vertiginous musicality’ and spirituality of stained glass led him to create The Cathedral of 1913” (ibid., pp. 31-32; see fig. 4).
“[Kupka] dreamed of ‘constructing abstract cosmogonies that mirrored, through the metaphor of geometric variations upon the circle, the origins of life or the formation of the solar system.’”
Margit Rowell synthesizes the artist’s greater aims thusly: “For Kupka, art was the projection of the highest form of human spirituality through evocative but autonomous forms and colors. The artist does not reproduce nature; but nature is his model for understanding the universal cosmic order. The natural process of growth, expansion, rotation, dilation, constriction are visible inferences of rhythms which man, as a part of the cosmic order, contains within his innermost being. These rhythms provide the structure of the artist’s vision” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Kunsthaus Zürich, František Kupka, 1871-1957, A Retrospective, 1975-76, p. 48).
Notably, Flux et reflux has retained a different title than the related compositions, perhaps owing to its early history. An inscription on the front of the work near the artist’s signature reads “à mon ami J. Sejnoha.” Gallery records indicate that Kupka presented this painting to his friend Jaroslav Šejnoha as a wedding gift.
As a young man, Šejnoha trained as an artist in Prague, befriending Kupka and the Czech expat community in Paris during a trip to the capital city in the course of his studies. Both Šejnoha and Kupka would go on to volunteer for service during the First World War on behalf of the Czech cause. Šejnoha would continue in civil service, joining the Czech embassy in Paris, where he served as commissioner for the Exhibition of Decorative Arts; and later becoming an ambassador to Egypt and the very first Czech ambassador to India. Through his years of diplomatic service, Šejnoha retained his passion for the arts, even publishing an essay on Kupka in 1964:
“Frank Kupka may be compared to Cézanne, who had recognized the limitations of Impressionism and changed it to something more solid and enduring by giving back to painting its claim to form, volume and construction. In the same way Frank Kupka indicated the end of Cubism and its mechanical application by giving back to painting its claim to colour, rhythm, and poetry….If Kupka's place in history can no longer be disputed, it should not be forgotten that this true classic of abstract art offers—through the probity of his disinterested life and the nobility of his solitary soul, as much as through the value, sincerity, and honesty of his work —the most splendid contribution in that Homeric battle being waged in our t.mes by an intellectual minority against the rising tide of conventional uniformity which threatens that the human species may become so monotonous and so ugly that life no longer would appear worth living" (Jaroslav Šejnoha, “Frank Kupka (1871-1957),” The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, The Hague; London; Paris, 1964, pp. 168 and 172).
