<p>Anniversary of the death of the pioneer of abstraction František Kupka</p>

    Prague - Pioneers of new directions in visual art have always had a hard time breaking through to the forefront, and this was also true for the representatives of abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century. František Kupka, a native of Opočno and one of the first painters to reach a purely abstract expression in his works, did not gain greater recognition during his lifetime. Today, however, Kupka, who died on June 24, 1957, is considered one of the famous modern artists in the world.
    When Kupka exhibited his nonfigurative paintings - Amphora, Two-Colored Fugue, and Warm Chromatics - for the first time at the Autumn Salon in Paris in 1912, people reacted awkwardly, and critics were merciless. "Mr. Kupka confuses us because he exhibits only simple arabesques," they wrote about the artist who in the first decade of the 20th century managed to assert himself primarily as an illustrator and caricaturist in the bohemian environment of Paris.
    Kupka was not interested in collective artistic programs, distanced himself from the avant-garde, and his practical and theoretical examination of painting form aimed at his own expression. He was a pure individualist, did not seek social contacts, and unlike his colleagues Vasily Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian, he never tried to expand his aesthetics beyond the realm of visual art.
    In Bohemia, where he was appointed a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts after World War I, his work was not received warmly by expert circles. For instance, theoretician Karel Teige essentially rejected Kupka because the painter, who permanently lived in France, had not gone through cubism, and "without cubism, the concept of a picture independent of natural reality would not be conceivable." Kupka's retrospective exhibition in Prague in 1946 also did not meet with great success.
    "In communist Czechoslovakia, Kupka's work was long considered a 'harmful example of imperialist ideology and cosmopolitan nihilism' and his works were stored in depositories," wrote Ludmila Vachtová, the author of the painter’s monograph. World galleries began to take an interest in the overlooked modern classic from the 1950s, when he exhibited in New York (1951) and especially in Paris (1958), which unfortunately came a year after his death.
    Today, at least some of Kupka's works are owned by leading Czech and world galleries and modern art museums. The most famous Czech modern painter currently holds a domestic auction record, as his Abstract Composition (1925-30) was sold for 13.4 million crowns (without auction fees) on May 20. However, Kupka's works were sold abroad years ago for nearly 18 million crowns when converted.
    František Kupka was born on October 23, 1871, in Opočno and spent his youth in Dobruška. He displayed a remarkable artistic talent from an early age, but initially trained as a saddler. At the initiative of teacher Alois Studnička from Jaroměř, Kupka studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and then continued in Vienna. In the mid-1890s, he settled in Montmartre, Paris.
    Kupka began with technically precise academic painting and drawing. He was inspired by an unusually wide range of interests, including space, astrology, biology, physics, modern technology, and music. He gradually reached nonfigurative painting. In 1910, he refused to "paint and copy trees when people on the way to the exhibition see better," but wanted to paint only "concepts, syntheses, harmonies, and similar things." In his first abstractions, Kupka found himself - as he wrote - "halfway between a musical tone and light."
    Since 1906, he lived with his second wife Nina Straubová in a house with a garden in Puteaux near Paris. In 1914, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and fought on the front, also helping to organize a Czech military unit in France. After the war, he lived in seclusion and spent most of his time in financial hardship, although he received some income from Prague's Academy and from his friend and patron Jindřich Waldese. The idiosyncratic Kupka did not know how to sell his paintings; for example, he only signed his first contract with a gallerist at the age of 80.
    Although as early as 1931, Alfred Barr jr. credited Kupka with pioneering abstract painting, the Czech artist felt misunderstood and experienced serious nervous crises. However, after World War II, he seemingly miraculously revived and continued to work in the realm of abstract art until his death.
    As Ludmila Vachtová wrote, Kupka was "a hedonistic ascetic in temperament, a rationalist romantic in thought, a mystic of materialism, a fanatic of symbolic imagination, and a constructor of pure concepts." Eventually, albeit belatedly, the world art critique and galleries recognized the artist of global caliber within him.