Around a point

Kupka studied in Prague and Vienna before settling in Paris in 1895, where he attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts and worked as a poster designer and illustrator. He began to show at the Salon d'Automne in 1906. The Futurist Manifesto, which was published in 1909 in Le Figaro, accelerated his adoption of a completely abstract mode of painting, as did Kupka's interest in the color experiments of Georges Seurat, and his attachments to Theosophy and Eastern philosophy. He became involved with the Section d'Or, or the Puteaux Group of artists, which met between 1911 and 1914 at the studios of Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp. Alongside Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay-Turk, Kupka developed Orphism, or Orphic Cubism, an abstract idiom that used luminous colors and curved forms. This sheet, with its curving and nested organic forms, exemplifies this lyrical style. It belongs to a series of studies Kupka made between 1911 and 1930. The related painting, in the Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, was begun in 1911 but not completed until 1927-30.