František Kupka

František Kupka... my favorite painter that i barely know anything about. i've been seeing snippets of images from him here and there for years. this is a recent batch i scared up. matthu stull showed me a book of his in 2001. he's definitely on to something (for the early part of last century, anyway...) he was part of the section d'or (golden section), as was marcel duchamp.

he started in a realistic style, although in a fairly fantastic "art nouveau" style a la alphonse mucha, displayed hear by "view from inside a carraige" (or something like that.)


he's more well known for his abstract work, however. i'm not a big fan of these chunks of black, blue and red paintings, although he did a bunch of them.


i find the more luxurious use of color he was prone to more inspiring. so did the synchromists.


he also had a morose side to his forms and color palette. i love the bleak light in this one. i hope it's HUGE... like ten feet tall!


this is from my favorite section of his work. it's from "the discs of newton" and gets into his color theory a bit. i love the use of multiple versions of a color in the same painting, like using crimson and cadmium. try it sometime, it's tough to organize! he was interested in the relationship between music and painting, hoped to "free colors of their descriptive associations" and was kind of anti-surrealist.