Fig. 1 František Kupka, Le Jaillissement II (Tryskání II), oil on canvas, 1922-23, sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, March 25, 2021 lot 146 for $10,360,269 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“In connection with Orphism, Apollinaire mentioned Frank Kupka, one of the least known but earliest pioneers of abstract painting…”
- Alfred H. Barr in Cubism and Abstract Art, New York 1936

In December 1935, an elderly Wassily Kandinsky wrote to his gallerist Jerome Neumann to reassert the claim that he had pioneered abstraction in a painting of 1911: “Indeed, it’s the world’s first ever abstract picture, because back then not one single painter was painting in an abstract style.” His principal contenders for this disputed title were Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay and František Kupka.

While one may be less concerned with the precise chronology of their respective achievements today, the question of their artistic legacy is more relevant than ever given the importance that the emergence of abstraction has since assumed in our assessment of modern artistic movements. The reputations of the first three have long-since been established, but Kupka has always been less visible within the received canon. Why should it have taken almost a century for his to become a household name?

“Once Kupka’s place in the canon of Abstract art becomes fully rehabilitated, his market prices will certainly soar.”
- Ludmila Lekeš in František Kupka. Catalogue raisonné des huiles, Prague, 2016

The Vertical and Diagonal Planes series to which the present lot belongs (see figs. 2 & 3), is a stunning sequence of paintings he began in 1913, anticipating an aesthetic more readily associated with the 1920s. It was a series he returned to throughout his life, demonstrating an acute awareness of contemporary discourse on color, spatial relationships and architectonic theories. The tension he achieves with vertical planes in Plans diagonaux is quintessential Kupka: elegant, architectural, inimitable.

“Although Kupka is probably the best-known Czech painter in the world, he wasn’t widely known in Czechoslovakia during the totalitarian regime and he wasn’t spoken about.”
Anna Pravdová, curator of the 2018 Kupka retrospective at The National Gallery in Prague

Kupka's Vertical and Diagonal Planes series

The reluctance of the Soviet authorities to acknowledge his artistic legacy is just one more example of Kupka’s persistent “outsider” status. His remarkable treatise interrogating color theory, the transcendental, and the symphonic dimensions in art did not find a publisher until 1923, over a decade after Kandinsky had disseminated Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by which t.mes the impact of is prescient ideas were lost. Kupka was also unusual among his group of contemporaries in enlisting voluntarily as a soldier in the First World War, achieving the rank of captain and helping to organize the Czech regiment in the French army. On his return to Puteaux he “struggled to climb onto the rapidly spinning carousel of art promotion” as Lekeš describes. “Despite the praise and attention his work received following the Salon d’Automne in 1912, he was no longer perceived as a relevant contributor to the development of Abstract art” (L, Lekeš in František Kupka. Catalogue raisonné des huiles, Prague, 2016, p.34).

The Return of the Outsider
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The Return of the Outsider

  • Salon d’Autumne, 1912
    Fig.4: Salon d'Automne, October 1912, Paris. Kupka’s Fugue in Two Colors (upper left) alongside works by Modigliani, Csaky, Picabia, Metzinger and Le Fauconnier

    František Kupka was a prominent exhibitor in the Salon d’Automne of 1912 and his abstract paintings are clearly those of the consummate insider. The marginal position assigned to his role in the development of abstract art is beginning to be challenged, with the top ten prices for his work all achieved over the course of the last decade.
  • Étude sur fond rouge (study), 1919
    František Kupka, Étude sur fond rouge (study), oil on canvas, 1919, Sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, June 19, 2013 for $3,022,072 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

    Kupka uses a hotter palette in Étude sur fond rouge than the present lot, yet his instinct for yellow and whites is apparent in both. One of the attractions of Kupka’s work is his sensitivity to the full range of European modernist currents. The dynamic, fragmented elements of his work have an affinity with the Italian Futurists, while his colors often recall the Blaue Reiter group of German Expressionists such as Franz Marc.
  • La Forme du bleu, 1924
    Fig. 6, František Kupka, La Forme du bleu, oil on canvas, 1924, Sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, November 14, 2016 for $2,172,500 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

    The vertical bands of color in the present lot have a similar vertiginous force and sense of magnetism as those in La Forme du bleu. Both compositions see Kupka shifting away from the organic shapes of his earlier work towards the sharper, more angular forms of his mechanistic paintings,dominated by a cooler palette.

    In the 1920s Kupka’s dedication to symbolism took his abstraction further towards the emblematic power of certain shapes and colors, echoing Kandinsky’s own artistic practice during his Bauhaus period. The physiological properties of color dictated their ideal shapes for Kupka: blue for example, ought to recede into space, enclosed by rectilinear forms.
  • Mouvement, circa 1913-1919
    Fig. 7, František Kupka, Mouvement (Pohyb), oil on canvas, circa 1913-19, Sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, June 13, 2011 for $2,442,097 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

    Kupka's pre-1920 paintings demonstrate his interest in cosmology and the interplay between the pictorial arts and music, but while his subject matter may shift there is a consistency to his painterly style throughout. Kupka never subscribed to any one artistic school and the voice which comes through his work is powerful, clear and unmistakably his own.
  • Le disque blanc, 1946
    Fig. 8, František Kupka, Le disque blanc (Bílý kotouč), oil on canvas, 1946, Sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, June 13, 2011 for $1,126,814 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

    “Kupka exerted considerable influence on both Delaunay and Mondrian, standing behind the artistic experiments that led to the first Orphist and geometric abstractions ever painted.” Mondrian was a regular visitor to Kupka’s studio in Puteaux. “The long-shared aesthetic outlooks of the two artists thus began to approach each other with increased visibility during the interwar years…. The series of moments of contact between Kupka and Mondrian culminated in an interesting dialogue discernible in the artistic output of the two artists between the late 1920s and late 1930s” (L. Lekeš in František Kupka. Catalogue raisonné des huiles, Prague, 2016, p. 35).
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The injustice of this exclusion is obvious. Indeed, as early as 1935, Alfred Barr warned that Kupka’s pioneering contributions to abstract painting were in danger of being overlooked. Barr included four oils by Kupka in the legendary 1936 exhibition of abstract art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, including Vertical planes (1912-13): “Its cold grey rectangles sharpened by a single violet plane anticipate the geometric compositions of Malevich, Arp, and Mondrian…Within a year's t.mes Kupka had painted what are probably the first geoMetricas l curvilinear and the first rectilinear pure-abstractions in modern art. In comparison with these conclusive and carefully considered achievements the slightly earlier abstractions of Kandinsky…seem tentative” (A. J. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936, New York, pp. 73-74).

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The Maison de Camille in Puteaux

Kupka moved to Paris in 1896 shortly after completing his training at the Vienna Academy of Replica Handbags s. He would later settle in the Parisian left bank suburb of Puteaux, a meeting point for artists including Andre Lhôte, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger and Jacques Villon, a group otherwise known as the “Section d’Or.” The town’s legendary restaurateur and collects or, Camille Renault, was the first owner of Plans diagonaux. Otherwise known as “Big Boy” and “Gargantua” on account of his prodigious girth and exuberance, Renault would pick up the tab for artists in exchange for their work (one of his favorite subjects being portraits of himself).

The impressive collects ion Renault built up in this manner included a number of works by Franticek Kupka as well as Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Andre Lhôte, Marcel Gromaire and Jean Dubuffet. The floor to ceiling exhibitions on the establishment’s walls provided a sufficient draw for the Parisian beau monde to make the trip to this celebrated suburb; guests ranged from Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman, and the menu apparently featured dishes such as ‘croustade Kupka’ alongside other delicacies such as ‘"turbot Villon," "soufflé Kandinsky" and "poulet Gauguin." Renault eventually opened a gallery on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris where he was better able to present his phenomenal collects ion, the majority of which was sold after his death in 1984.