As part of the sale dedicated to Modern and Contemporary Art on Thursday, May, 28th, 2020, PIASA auction house is offering for sale a gouache created by one of the pioneers of Abstract Art, the German painter František Kupka.
The teenager was a self-taught painter preparing for the Prague Academy of Fine Arts competition, which he passed in 1889. He was taught in the sacred and historical painting section and graduated. In the Vienna of Mahler, Klimt and Freud, the painter became familiar with spiritualism, which was very much in vogue at the end of the 19th century.
In 1896, Kupka moved to Montmartre, one of the epicentres of pictorial modernity. He improved a modest daily newspaper by producing illustrations for magazines, such as the Assiette au beurre, and posters for cabarets. He then frequented Juan Gris and Félix Vallotton.
The anarchist context in which he was evolving at the time distanced him from theosophy and spirituality. The young man then took physiology classes at the Sorbonne and studied optics and mechanics. During this period, he produced a large number of illustrations such as those in the Bible or L'Homme et la Terre by the geographer Élisée Reclus.
Contemporary of the aesthetic research carried out by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevitch, František Kupka emancipated himself from figuration. In 1912, his paintings were presented at the Salon d'Automne. He was introduced to Cubist circles by his friend Jacques Villon. Nourished by exchanges within the group known as the Section d'Or, the following year the painting published La Création dans les arts plastiques, a collection of texts written in French. František Kupka voluntarily joined the First World War and found himself, alongside the writer Blaise Cendrars, in the trenches of the Somme.
As soon as the guns fall silent, the artist takes up his brushes again. In 1921, the Povolozky Gallery in Paris organised his first monographic exhibition.
Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957)
Composition abstraite, circa 1920
Gouache and India ink on paper
Signed down in the center
Annotated on the back: "Frank Kupka, 7 rue Lemaitre, Puteaux (Seine)"
14,8 x 24 cm
Rather discreet before the 1920s, the colour black spreads over the surface of the work offered for sale on Thursday, May, 28th, 2020 by PIASA. This Abstract Composition is estimated at between 7,000 and 9,000 euros. Characteristic of its aesthetics, the forms painted in gouache, as if dislocated, translate a circular movement.
In 1931 he founded the Abstraction-Creation movement alongside the painter Auguste Herbin and will be among the European artists whose work is presented in the exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art" at the MoMA. One year after his death in 1957, the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris organized an ambitious retrospective of his work.
