Abstractions

The Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (France).

Gouache.

One of a series of 16 abstractions painted by Frantisek Kupka in the late 1920s and early 30s. The first 12 works were originally published in 1933 on one page of the second issue of the Review, and all 16 were later published as a separate volume. This composition consists of minimalist lines; other works of the series include circles, spirals and rectangles. Common to all is a clean white background. The forms are thoughtfully located on the canvas space, reflecting the artist’s wider transition from sinuous and streamlined forms of Orphism to geometric ones. Such preferences were dictated not only by his passion for abstraction but also by the growing popularity of the art deco style. Creating radically simplified, strict images, the author focused on the dominance of the vertical line. In his book “Creation in Plastic Arts”, Kupka noted that “there is the greatness of statics in the vertical” and “the vertical is the basis of life in space in its solemnity”.