Les Sorcières (The Witches)

Kupka was a painter and graphic artist who helped develop the abstract style known as Orphism, or Orphic Cubism. Before he settled in Paris in 1895, he was educated by Nazarene artists in Prague and Vienna. The Nazarenes advocated the return of painting to the spiritual orientation of the late Middle Ages in Germany. This background would later lead him to abstraction, but this pastel belongs to a group of compositions from ca. 1898-1900, which depict women identified as witches. Kupka was interested in the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, and this sheet may have been inspired by the story “The Black Cat,” which repeats the superstition that a black cat is a witch in disguise. The blond woman in the foreground is thought to be Maria Bruhn, the artist's lover, who died in 1898.