A Visit to the Pompidou
First off I'd like to send a warm thank you out to Daniel for recommending that I visit the Pompidou Center in Paris. Within the Pompidou I wandered around viewing works by Matisse, Spero and Duschamps, and also one artist in particular whos work inspired me, Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957).
Frantisek Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist who was one of the forerunners of the Modern art movement. His works were first based on realism then he moved more into pure abstraction. The work that struck my fancy in particular was Compliment (1912) as seen below:
The second of his works that I admired was Autour d'un Point (1920):
I retourned to look at these two paintings three or four times while I was at the museum. Kupka's paintings have a life of their own. A quality of a living being and not merely a replication of an idea or a consept. The intracasies of his artwork enlightened me for I often have equated Abstract with primitive and unskilled. Food for thought.
1 comment:
Leah, I am glad that you located Kupka. And, indeed, he is anything but unskilled. Although he did work as an illustrator, he was deeply interested in color theory and movement. In art history, he is often grouped with colorists and abstractionists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. It's interesting to think about the parallel developments taking place in other arts at this time, for example, literature. Writers,such as Gertrude Stein, begin to approach abstraction.
I wonder what you think of his work in comparison to Cubists, such as Picasso and Braque. What characteristics or approaches do they share or not?
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