Description
Coloured etching on paper (1913), 24×16 cm, 63×52 cm (including frame), signed in the right lower corner of the print, stamp Kupka in the right lower corner. Gravure associée à Amphore (Etching related to Amorpha).
Origin: auction house Prague.
Published in the catalogue Retrospective, František Kupka, 1871-1957, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, page 186.
Exhibited at the French Institute Praha, 14.9.-3.11.2016.
The highest price achieved in auction for Kupka´s oil on canvas – 56 million CZK in the year 2012, Adolf Loos Apartment and Gallery, Prague.
The highest price achieved in auction for Kupka´s graphics – 8 thousand USD, Sotheby’s New York.
The highest known price for Kupka´s graphics achieved in gallery sale – 500 thousand CZK in the year 2016, Prague.
This coloured version of etching is clearly one of the many studies to famous Kupka´s work – Amorpha (it also exists in several versions), which is in the collection of the Prague National Gallery. Amorpha belongs to one of the first abstract works of Kupka. They were exhibited in Salon de Paris in the year 1912. Also, Amorpha belongs to the first abstract works of modern painting in the world. The word Amorpha is Kupka´s neologism by which he wanted to express that the Form comes to existence somewhere between the Chaos and the Order. Morphism – also the expression of Kupka – was the synonym of creation. This does not mean the depiction of the reality, it means creation of one´s own forms, this is why Amorpha. Circular shapes express the exploration of movement: they represent the movement of the ball, which is held by a child on the Kupka´s famous work Girl with the Ball from the year 1908 (This girl was his step-daughter Andrée; when Kupka met his future wife Eugenie, her daughter was three years old.). The ball was in the resting position in Kupka´s mind and then it started to make fictive trajectories – quite similar to the movements of the planets in the universe. These movements Kupka worked with in several other studies also.
Kupka was coming back during his whole carrier to this way of abstract expression in the image, which should in the same time express a true relation to the reality. It is not possible to say that his carrier was divided to certain phases and linear development: similar studies, graphics and drawings are found in Kupka´s work in the span of several decades. On the basis of labelling, which theorists occupying themselves with studying the work of Kupka are using, this study belongs to the Cosmological ones. The coloured study served him for exploration of optical phenomena which he studied literally scientifically. The object of his interest was the Colour as physical, chemical, physiological, psychological, ontological and primarily esthetical phenomenon. According to Kupka, the aesthetics of colours in the Art is different to the one we find in the nature; this is why he combines the coloured areas in an experimental way. The Colour exists only through other colours, this is what Kupka says. We can see a parallel to this study in the famous painting Oval Mirror.
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