Alongside modern masters such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky (figs. 1 & 2), František Kupka was one of the most important artists on the path to abstraction in the early twentieth century. After his training at the Academy of Replica Handbags s in Prague and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, Kupka moved to Paris in 1896 where for the first t.mes he was exposed to paintings by Neo-Impressionist artists. Inspired by their bold use of primary colour, he adapted their ground-breaking technique as part of his own quest to better understand the association between colour and form. Kupka considered himself a ‘colour symphonist’ and felt a strong connection between individual colours and particular emotions. As a result, from 1909 onwards Kupka increasingly turned away from depicting external reality and moved towards a radically simplified pictorial composition, creating new harmonies and rhythms that expressed his inner state.

Kupka’s exploration of colour and form found full fruition in a series of three works titled Le Jaillissement I - III and painted between 1922-23. The present work is the second in this series and as with the other works is based on vertical lines of colour radiating from a central point in the lower half of the composition. It possesses a sense of vertiginous force and magnetism which create the dynamic and forceful upward thrust of the title. This is further reinforced by the artist’s colour scheme. In these works Kupka abandoned the vibrant and modulated colours of his earlier work for a palette dominated by primary blue and red tones set against a white and cream background. Kupka’s belief in the emblematic power of certain shapes and colors is highly evident in the present work. In writing about Kupka’s artistic theory, Margit Rowell commented: ‘For Kupka, the physiological properties of color (number, length, speed of wave lengths) dictate an ideal shape. [...] The ideal form for blue is vertical and rectilinear. Blue, like its closest neighbors on the spectrum, because it seems to recede in space, or at least draw back into itself, should be motivated or enclosed by tapered, rectilinear form’ (M. Rowell, František Kupka 1871-1957. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, p. 280).

While Le Jaillissement I (Tryskání I) (fig. 5) retains the more organic, undulating shapes characteristic of Kupka’s earlier work, the present painting demonstrates his shift towards the sharper, more angular forms of his mechanical paintings. Inspired by his interest in the dynamic forms and impressive scale of modern architecture, it also pays homage to Kupka’s fascination for Gothic architecture (figs. 3 & 4). The sense of upward movement, of propulsion toward the sky, is only further accentuated by the elongated vertical shape of the canvas. As Ludmila Vachtovà writes: ‘As the circle symbolised a complete cycle to Kupka even before he began to think of abstract paintings, so the vertical had the symbolic meaning of reaching out for ‘luminous heights’ [...] Kupka himself was mainly interested in historic architecture. Apart from his thorough study of archaeology, he had also filled his sketchbooks with drawings of Greek temples which, like Gothic cathedrals, he admired as perfect architecture. This admiration emerged in some of his pictures which are reduced to the form of the basic relation of the upward thrust and the weight of the mass, or to a harmonious contrast between the material and the immaterial.’ (L. Vachtovà, Frank Kupka, London, 1968, p. 102)