Madame Kupka among Verticals

Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Oil on canvas.

The work belongs to the period when Frantisek Kupka passed the stages of fascination with Cubism, Futurism and Fauvism. The brightly coloured canvas consists of uneven verticals that almost hide the face of the artist’s wife as if enveloping it. It is painted in markedly unnatural shades of green and purple. The artist later said that to create this painting he recreated one of the unfinished portraits of his wife, drawing uneven coloured strokes around her face until it was almost completely hidden by this bold abstractly flat pattern. Such a solution can be considered as a method involving a visual attack on figurative painting.