Art: Catching the Astral Plane

To French eyes, Frantisek Kupka was, for the last 20 years of his life, an ir relevance: a withered Czech emigre, with sunken cheeks and a disproportionately large appetite for food, who lived in a small cluttered house in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, surrounded by old abstract paintings that nobody wanted.

His much better-known colleague, the painter Jacques Villon, lived next door.

When collectors and dealers walked by their gate to call on Villon, Kupka and his mountainous wife Eugenie would peer through the shutters at them, too proud to show themselves. The collectors never stopped at the Kupkas'. In the past, they had been so poor that Eugenie Kupka now and then had to buy old tablecloths and underwear in the flea market, launder them and sell them to raise a few francs.

For a few years before his death in 1957 at the age of 86, Kupka was able to subsist on the sales of his work.

However, in those last years of the School of Paris, when French cultural chauvinism was quite as bloated as its American counterpart later became, Kupka labored under a distinct handicap: his obvious foreignness as an artist. His work looked, and in deed was, Northern rather than Mediterranean, full of theoretical obsessions, flights of mysticism, involuted decor, heavy symbolism and transcendental yearnings. There have been greater abstract artists than Kupka, but none so unmistakably Slavic. Later, when Kupka's eminence as a pioneer of abstract art was recognized—his first completely abstract pictures were done around 1910-11—the French tried to claim him as a true Parisian in whom the Central European heritage was aesthetically unimportant.

Code of Shapes. This kind of nonsense only served to confuse Kupka's image more, and so for most people he remains the least known of all the significant figures in early European modern ism. A full-dress retrospective was needed. Now it has come: 190 paintings, drawings and studies, opening this week at New York's Guggenheim Museum.

The show is the result of three years' research by Art Historian Margit Rowell, whose catalogue—assisted with material from another student of Kupka's art, Meda Mladek—becomes the definitive work so far on this little-known, uneven but (at best) engrossing artist.

Some painters carry a code of shapes, their handwriting, all their lives.

Kupka was one. Among the earliest paintings in this show is a dark still life, done around 1906, of a red cabbage plucked from the garden at Puteaux —leaf after exuberant leaf, dappled and veined, spiraling inward toward its round core. This system of forms crops up in painting after painting from Kupka's maturity, like the large and magisterial Around a Point, 1925 (see color page). It carried for him a weight of symbolic associations that had to do with growth, movement and cosmic energy.

Since his youth, Kupka had been intensely interested in spiritualism; he was a frequent hiker on the astral plane.