A Sense and Essence of Nature: Wave Patterns in the Paintings of František Kupka

Abstract

The Czech painter František Kupka is a co-founder of modern abstract art along with Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. Although the least known of this group, Kupka was the first to exhibit an abstract painting publicly in the fall of 1912; in fact, two abstract paintings were shown by Kupka that year, Vertical Planes I and Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours. They were the culmination of a long process dating back to 1904 and, arguably, even further back to 1894 when Kupka was living in Vienna.1 The 1912 paintings embody Kupka’s almost single-minded pursuit of the fundamental elements that make up our world, all of which, according to the artist, share a common feature, namely their vibratory nature. The following discussion examines the nature of Kupka’s ‘vibratory modernism’ and its origins in the science and mysticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.