Early, Funky Kupka

Towards a New Era: Kupka: Graphic Works, 1894-1912, Musee d'Orsay (Paris). Ends October 26. Part of Bohemia Magica (May-December 2002), a French tribute to Czech culture.

To a viewer used to thinking of Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) as a pioneer of abstract painting (peer of Kandinsky and Delaunay), it is serendipitous to find him trying on diverse artistic identities in Paris as a young man. No longer a small town boy, metropolitanized by educational stints in both Prague and Vienna, he had first of all to find ways of surviving economically in the heady ambience of a Paris fast becoming the world center of aspiring artists. He did it mainly by illustrating books, working for new satire magazines, but all the while angling for opportunities to become a free artist, liberated to pursue the esthetic visions which would culminate in his career as a pathbreaking abstractionist.

What first strikes you is his funky boldness, whether in limning a raw sexuality in illustrating classics like "Lysistrata" or "Song of Songs" or raging visually against a society he saw as corrupted by money. He wore his flaming ideals on his sleeve, in crafting images like the crucified worker in Chaplin's "Modern Times" or in joining the Czech Foreign Legion in World War I. Indeed, his "mature" work came only after his Paris won prestige started landing him sizeable honoraria from Czech institutions.

The Kupka we see in this fascinating gloss on the emergence of a vibrant Czech culture is a young man nervously on the make, not sure how he's going to support his artistic aspirations but damn sure to give it his funky best. In these eighteen years (between the ages of 23 and 41) there were many Franz's trying on this or that mask. All the time, just squeaking by financially.

He was perceived at age three as a gifted drawer. And he was encouraged insofar as a poor family could, until a cross stepmother put an end to his aspirations. Apprenticed to a saddle maker, he showed his bent by crafting a business sign for his master. That man also introduced him to spiritualism, after which he became a medium to finance his art studies in Prague. He channeled his favorite Czech artist, Josef Manes. In Prague and Vienna he studied mainly under proponents of history painting, then the most prestigious genre. That background would stand in good stead when he undertook a giant project of illustrating a multi-volume history of the world.

Finally, age 23, he minded the main chance and moved to Paris, scrabbling for years at odd jobs. He fell in with a Danish couturier, who advanced him money and got him jobs in fashion illustration. And he illustrated stories for newspapers in Berlin and Prague. But the big breakthrough was working for the new satirical reviews in Paris which channeled intellectual dissent against the Biggest Three Evils, Big Money, the Church, and the Army. There he hit his stride doing special issues for a review with the cockeyed name of "Butter Dish". It is astonishing to realize that these cranky, outraged images (like those you see today in IMF/World Bank picketing!) came from the same muse as his later, mature works.

He settled down in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, in 1906 with high visibility artistic neighbors like Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamps, but he was a loner who rarely joined their meetings. The exhibition poster, "Prometheus in Red and Blue" (1909-10) shows him fiercely experimenting with the isms rampant in the French art world, solidly on the way to his own synthesis in abstraction. The watercolor on paper is a raging meld of Fauviste color and broad stroke Pointillism. He got a sinecure from Prague to introduce Czech art students to Paris. (Once it was cut off because the academicians were miffed at his frontier esthetics! He got the job back, only if he agreed to turn his paintings to the wall when he was lecturing the neophytes.)

When Alfons Mucha got a big show at the Jeu de Paume in 1936, the Czech ambassador to France talked them into including Kupka. Mucha's Sarah Bernhardt posters got all the attention. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the Museum of Modern Art's prescient director, Alfred H.Barr, made him the focus the same year of a first, "Cubism and Abstract Art" and observed that Kupka was "one of the least known but earliest pioneers of abstract."

And back in Prague, his far out stuff in the National Gallery ("formalistic and incomprehensible to the people") was stored away under lock and key, shown only to visitors from the West who asked for it. Talk about little honor in his own country.(But not forever: the catalog lists over 140 major exhibitions all over the world.) One of his few consolations was support from his Maecenas, Jindrich Waldes, Czech industrialist. He took Kupka's neglected work to the United States and quietly gave the painter twice what he got for it there.

In fact, if you can't get to Paris for this celebration of Kupka's early struggles to find his eye, the catalog (at 39 euros) is a splendid consolation: a richly detailed chronology of his entire career, generous illustrations in both black and white and color, and fascinating images of him, where he lived and worked, and critical essays on his tortured development. He may have ended up a sad and frustrated isolato, but he left a lively heritage for us all to savor.