Page 43 - Studio International - August 1965

Frank Kupka

Plans verts (II) 1930/32 surprised that Kupka so often has borrowed the titles of elsewhere, an elsewhere where the demon of the
Gouache
23 x 25.5 cm. of his works from the vocabulary of music. music reigns and where furious aspirations are con­
Galerie Karl Flinker. Paris Here we touch the most secretive particularities of this stantly evoked to the total creative freedom and to
man of Central Europe and more precisely of romantic the pure contemplation beyond the fashions and the
Bohemia. It is true he had become completely a subject accidents of reality.
of Paris and of what is more Parisian in Paris, that is to It is this elsewhere which was the real native land of
say its boroughs: Montmartre, Puteaux. It is of this Frank Kupka. In our world he was appearing as a
popular Paris that his wife was a native, his lifelong• spiritual. This is to say one of these men who, in their
companion who after his death guarded his work with retreat, live only by their mind. And it is this which
such fidelity. Assuredly all his work was produced in explains this air of perfect nobility which emanated
Paris and in the School of Paris; this is to say the from his person, the discreet elegance of his 'allure'
French School has the right to claim it. This work and the gravity and contemplativeness of his physiog­
constitutes one of the most important chapters in the nomy and maybe the slight disquiet which could
struggle of our avant-gardes at the beginning of the sometimes be discerned in it. He has lived only in his
twentieth century, of cubism and of orphism and of work, by his work and with his work. And this makes
this group of the Golden Section to which he belonged it difficult to classify and date his work. Because he
with his neighbour, Jacques Villon and with all the was incessantly taking up again old works, abandoning
magnificent and bubbling youth which assembled in the series which was on hand to go back to a previous
his studio in Puteaux. But it is undeniable that to all series, but is it not thus that the hermits alternate their
spiritual exercises? They develop outside time, or
the common action, Frank Kupka brought a personal rather in a time which escapes our measurement ■
note in which we cannot but hear certain harmonics
73