Page 42 - Studio International - January February 1975

in terms of Duchamp's own time when every artist felt it his duty to red and blue ball, and she draws
psychosexual catharsis's — in other words, turn his back on the Eiffel Tower in attention to a picture entitled The Bow,
it is simply a kind of pictorial essay protest against the architectural also dated 1912, with its 'fan-like shapes,
waiting for a critic to translate its visual blasphemy which it proclaimed in the the sub-text of which is nothing other
language into conceptual terms. If this sky. The discovery and than the gesture of bowing separated into
were true, it would be possible to make rehabilitation of these strange beings of its phases'. A similar example, perhaps
art scientifically: the evolutionary model iron and steel that were distinguished somewhat older, is an ink drawing
is ready, and it remains only to fill it out from the familiar aspects of nature by Woman Picking Flowers, reproduced in
12
with the appropriate artifacts or their construction and by the the catalogue Kupka avant 1914
activities. Art theory is a science; art is dynamism inherent in the automatic and dated by Denise Fedit, apparently
technology. movements they gave rise to, were in too early, at 'around 1908'.
According to some others, art is simply themselves a bold, revolutionary The principle of Kupka's The Bow is
the handmaiden of political history. act.. . . identical to that of Duchamp's jeune
Ursula Meyer offers a very simple What Gabrielle Buffet wrote about her homme triste and Nu descendant un escalier,
explanation of Duchamp's work : journey with Picabia in 1913 applies and if Futurist pictures did not and
At the eve of World War One, equally well to Duchamp's introduction could not have influenced Duchamp, it
Duchamp coined the term anti-art, to New York two years later. It was seems very probably that Kupka's
implying his disdain for the a voyage of discovery full of surprises. speculations and experiments did. In the
establishment's inept practices in art The appearance of the city, the streets, introduction to Picabia's catalogue in
and politics. The ready-mades were the neon signs - unknown back home - 1926" Duchamp writes that 'my aim
sarcastic jibes against an elitist art and the often grandiose architecture, was a static representation of movement'
world. . . . According to Hans Richter, such as the iron and steel bridge on and even in his lecture 'Apropos of
the meaning of Duchamp's Fountain 59th Street, were a source of really new Myself' delivered in 1964, he speaks,
was that he was pissing on the impressions and wonder for us. commenting on Nu descendant escalier, in
establishment's aesthetic values [etc. ]7. Human relations were no less the same way as Kupka once did. Cubism
In this interpretation, the relation of unexpected, being void of all the was closer to him than Futurism, he
modern art to history is stood on its head traditions of culture and civility of the recalled, but he was very much taken by
and art appears in fact as something of no Old Europe. They were almost brutal Balla's Dynamism of a dog on a leash
use. but at the same time simple and warm, because it depicted 'the successive static
something that did not displease us in positions of the dog's legs and leash.'"
An artist naturally lives in his own
3. the least.9 Duchamp's brothers had their studios in
time and is even formed by it, and of no Duchamp was always resolutely Puteaux next to Kupka's; they frequently
one is this perhaps truer than of against having his art connected with met with Kupka and Duchamp, who
Duchamp. Cubist art remained in the futurism. In fact, futurist pictures could lived in nearby Neuilly, often walked to
pre-industrial world, and futurism took not have directly influenced him, because Puteaux. It seems more likely, therefore,
from the industrial world its external until the futurist exhibition in the Gallery that Duchamp saw Kupka's pictures,
features : its dynamism and its forms. Berheim Jeune et Cie. in 1912, not even rather than the other way around. Of
But while the futurists depicted the photographs of these works were course Duchamp was influenced by
industrial world, as Duchamp said, available" and Duchamp had already analytical Cubism and its lack of colour
impressionistically, Duchamp discovered painted Jeune homme triste dans un train and his phasing of motion became a
its symbolic significance. He proved and Nu descendant un escalier in 1911. dramatic, spatial event, whereas Kupka,
ready to become a citizen in this new Nevertheless, he had almost certainly who was ten years older and still drawing
world, to accept it as a new kind of nature, read the Futurist Manifesto as it was on the tradition of Art Nouveau, tended
to make it a part of his own inner world. published in Le Figaro on 20 February, rather towards colouristic decorativeness.
It began with Duchamp's memorable 1909; practically everyone read it then There is one more interesting link
automobile trip with Picabia in 1912 and its radical anti-traditionalism spoke between Kupka and Duchamp's circle.
from Etival in the department of Jura to directly to the spirit of many. Even In Weiner's article from August, 1912,
Paris, along with Apollinaire and Frantisek Kupka had it tacked to the Kupka is quoted as saying that he was
Gabrielle Buffet. Duchamp included a door of his studio : the young Czech poet attempting 'amorphous painting' - that is,
poetic record of that journey among the Richard Weiner saw it there when he painting without form, created from pure
preparatory notes for the Large Glass visited Kupka in July, 1912. He wrote an colour - and in the Autumn Salon in 1912,
with good reason. It is one of the earliest article about his visit shortly afterward for he exhibited his two Amorphas. One of
of those notes and the key to everything a Prague newspaper," and in it he Kupka's key paintings, Nocturne, most
that followed. It is also very likely that mentions Kupka's studies of motion. probably from 1910, is in that sense
this trip and the conversations According to Weiner, Kupka did not `amorphous'. A year after Kupka's
connected with it explain Apollinaire's agree with the Futurists' attempt to conversation with Weiner, in July 1913,
famous sentence in his short text on capture 'simultaneity of sequences' Picabia published his manifesto Towards
Duchamp in 'Les peintres cubistes' (which was, of course, more a theory of Amorphism in the New York Camera
written in that same year, 1912, simultanéisme), but rather he tried in his Work. In it, he carries the idea of
according to which Duchamp was to painting to represent a 'shifting'. As a amorphism to its ultimate conclusions: 'it
`reconcile art and the people'. For document of this Kupka showed Weiner is time to do away with colour after
modern urban man, the machine is a new a picture of riders in the Bois de having gotten rid of form'. He illustrated
form of nature and Duchamp's Boulogne that was an attempt to his thesis with two black squares
relationship to the machine was the same illustrate motion in successive phases. entitled Bain and La mer, leaving it to the
intimacy felt by an engineer, a chauffeur Two drawings by Kupka on this subject viewer to create the pictures in his own
or a worker towards his machine: he feels have been preserved, but they are mind." Picabia at the same time refers to
it to be a living being, his 'mechanical unsigned. In the catalogue for the last a number of contemporary artists but
bride'. (It is significant that from the Kupka retrospective in Prague (1968), oddly enough he does not mention
beginning of the machine age, the Ludmila Vachtová quite illogically dates Kupka. The reason is most probably to be
English have given their machines the first, a pencil drawing (no. 128) at found in the fact that Kupka had lost
feminine names like the 'Spinning around 1911 and the second, in ink contact with other Parisian painters. He
Jenny'.) Gabrielle Buffet, who was a (no. 129) between 1900 and 1902; but was a cyclothymiac; after the euphoric
witness to all this as well as a participant, we must clearly unify the dating and shift elan of the years from 1909 to 1912, he
writes in her Aires abstraits (1957) of the it to the period between 1909 and 1912. began to experience severe depressions
importance that all of them at that time Nevertheless, what Weiner saw in and in those decisive years before the war,
had attributed to the machine, that Kupka's studio were not drawings but a he lost interest in his work and in
new arrival, the offspring of the human painting on the same theme In her contact with people. In 1914, he
brain, truly a fille née sans mere. . . . monograph on Kupka (1968) Vachtová volunteered for the army and disappeared
I recall a time when its rapid shows that Amorpha (1912) was also from the art scene until he returned in
proliferation was taken as a calamity, a based on a study of the movement of a 1921 - as a personality who by that time

32