Reflections in a Mirror

FRANTISEK KUPKA, along with his better-known contemporaries, Kandinsky and Mondrian, pioneered abstract painting. To look back at his prolific work is to trace the history of twentieth century aesthetics, and the development of an art that tries to embody concepts--non-objective art. Born in 1871 in Czechoslovakia, Kupka came to Paris, the center of artistic activity in 1896, and soon settled down in the suburb of Puteaux, where he lived the rest of his life.

Kupka's oeuvre remains in the suburbs of art. The paintings reflect the currents of the time; they imitate, sometimes innovate, but they lack that certain force of original expression. Kupka is unwilling to take his experiments with line, color or form all the way; he tends to eschew the radical for the pleasing. Perhaps as a result of this tentative quality, he never developed a style of his own. Though his paintings can be grouped into "periods" and arranged in chronological sequence--as has been done at the Guggenheim show, which closed last week--these periods are not stages in a progression towards a unique artistic voice, but a series of disjointed and often imitative efforts to find such a mode of expression.

The paintings show Kupka's sizeable vocabulary of line and color, the grammatical expertise of his construction, and the complexity of the thought he is trying to convey. But the majority of the works fail to make an artistic statement. It's hard to pinpoint Kupka's shortcomings. Certainly he had a clearly defined idea of his art (even if it's hard to follow):

The work of art, which is itself an abstract reality, must be formed from invented elements. The concrete significance arises out of a combination of morphological archetypes and the architectonic conditions appropriate to its own intrinsic organism.

He executed this extremely cerebral (!) conception with skilled craftsmanship: an eloquence of line, a designer's eye for color.

What the show demonstrates, however, is that art theory plus craft does not equal art. Each of Kupka's major works is hung so that it is prefaced by a group of his preparatory line and color studies. Too often, in the progression from the fluent immediacy of the crayon sketch to the lyrical color study to the painting, the art loses itself in an exercise, becomes stilted, studies. The line drawings for the "Girl with a Ball" (1907-8) reveal a great sensitivity to form, the color studies a highly developed Fauvist technique, in which an unrestricted palette expresses shape and perspective. But as Kupka notes on one sketch: "here...maybe I am regressing to the post card." And the final result is a very indifferent painting--as the artist evidently felt himself, judging by the number of times he reworked and restudied, the theme.

A more successful series culminates in "Planes by Colors: Large Nude" (1909-10). Here the simply conceived form of the reclining woman in the sketch is amplified by the free, expressive use of color--green highlights, purple-pink shade. The personality seen in the line is universalized by the abstraction of the color: the painting is a vibrant whole.

The contemporary series "Woman Picking Flowers" is more experimental. Kupka breaks down the components of a motion (picking flowers), colors them in the progression of the spectrum, and superimposes them one on the other in what seems to be an expression of simultaneous motion and sunlight. The result does not go much beyond the level of an exercise--though in the last two or three, where the lines of the motion begin to dominate, rather than the fragmented forms, there appear hints of a new fusion.

Using motion as the integrating force was Kupka's first step towards a school of' painting Ezra Pound called "Vorticism The (theoretical) aim of the group, as Pound saw it, was "to portray the idea of motion itself." Kupka began trying to capture motion through the vibrancy of color; in "Newtonian Disks" (1912) the pure tones, reds, blues, yellows, are liberated from form. They no longer express the form of an object, but establish their own rhythm, make their own music.

THE STUDIES from "Newtonian Disks", which follow that painting in sequence down the ramp of the Guggenheim museum, blend almost imperceptibly into studies for "Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors." This painting is too large to be hung where it should chronologically be placed; one has to descend in suspense through Kupka's "pseudo-Expressionist," "pseudo-Mondrian" and "art deco" periods before finding it, at the bottom. "Fugue," painted in 1912, is indeed greater than anything else Kupka ever did. It represents a culmination of his nonprofessional interests--astronomy, music, and mysticism--as well as his artistic abilities: his skill with color, the grace of his line, and the complex nature of his conception of his art: "the highest endeavor of human spirituality." This canvas transcends paint to become an audible as well as visual experience. Red and blue curves rotate across the black and white disks of the background to create a visual rhythm. The color is music, the form is motion. In these exhilarating bright sweeps across an indefinable plane, Kupka has painted the sound of celestial bodies spinning in space.

His later work does not measure up to this painting. More and more, in the later series, Kupka seems to be losing any sense of his own identity as a painter. His post-World-War-I work gradually discards the "spiritual" for a progressive mechanization of imagery and color. The magic and the music of the earlier paintings disappears; the movement here is not that of the cosmos, but that of a machine. These canvases are products of design, not creation.

The Kupka exhibit starts at the top of the Guggenheim and spirals down through time, following the turns of "modern art." Kupka imitates or reflects dominant influences of his time: Matisse, Delaunay, Gross, Mondrian, Kay Nelson. But in looking at the works as a retrospective of the major aesthetic revolutions of our time, Kupka's theoretical contribution to those revolutions should not be ignored. Nor should his artistic (well, not genius, but) talent: his sensuous lyricism, keen sensitivity, and his occasional inspiration. Kupka is a mirror worth looking at.