Page 41 - Studio International - August 1965

is an act of genius. Because, without doubt, historical two paintings classified under the same title of
circumstances accompany it, maybe there is in this act Amorpha, the one: Fugue a deux couleurs, the other:
what one calls causes and reasons, maybe it accom­ Chromatique chaude.
plished itself in certain conditions, external and These works are essentially singular. and this singu­
personal. It no less remains that the act has something larity, in conjunction with the singularities emerging
of suddenness, of contradiction and of newness and more or less at the same epoch in other parts will
that in this sense one can say that it calls on what become, today, the current language of painting. But
one must describe as genius. we must linger in the moment of the singularity.
One must, to understand it, place oneself in the This is a response primarily to a violent and total
atmosphere of the Paris of 1894 when this young need of creation. To create! It is the title of a text that
Czech has just arrived and in the same time to place Kupka will publish a little later in an avant garde

White on Blue and Red 1924
72 x 80 cm.
Galerie Louis Carre. Paris

oneself in the most intimate point of the conscience journal, La Vie des Lettres, and where he will proclaim
of the man. He has, in his first years, in Prague and this need that he felt awakening in him and which he
Vienna been subject to the influence of the Jugendsti/. will try and analyse. Because, if an inventor invents,
In Paris, he appears as one of the very first painters of it is because he has felt the irresistible need to invent.
these young foreigners who, coming from all parts of Maybe this impulse towards invention was then
the world, will participate. in such energetic fashion general, and the whole epoch tended towards revolu­
in one of the most magnificent renewals of the tionising the plastic arts. But, beyond the revolutions
universal history of arts. He lives in Montmartre, later, which then express themselves - fauvism, cubism,
in 1906, in Puteaux and enters in the legendary epoch expressionism, soon dadaism and surrealism -the most
of the School of Paris. In 1 911 he shows at the Salon essentially and integrally absolutely revolutionary is
d'Automne, a canvas called Plans parcouleurs (Planes assuredly the one which manifests its exigence by some
by colour) ; the following year another with the same isolated inventors, Kandinsky, Delaunay, Picabia,
title at the lndependants. and at the Salon d'Automne Kupka, those, who beyond such revolutions, make
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