Musea Kampa's Interactive Programs
Kupka & …
Level: advanced elementary school, high school, universitiy
Number of participants: max. 25*
Program lenght: 60 minutes
Led by: Kateřina Třísková
This three-part program investigates the most important aspects of the life and work of František Kupka, the Czech pioneer of abstract art. It is possible to select one of the programs or attend all three parts subsequently, e.g. one program per week or per month. When attending all three programs, the participants will receive a special Museum Kampa certificate.**
Part I. The Path to Abstraction
From small drawings of Parisian prostitutes towards colourful forms and shapes: this program illustrates Kupka’s elaborate path towards abstract painting. In the times when Malevich kept creating cubistic futurism pieces with evident figurative motives and Kandinskij discovered abstraction in a painting he saw upside-down in his atelier, Kupka was already exhibiting purely abstract paintings in 1912 in the autumn salon in Paris. Why did Kupka find abstraction and not any other kind of visual expression at the end of his path and why was his artistic triumph followed by misunderstanding and disregard from the side of the art critiques and viewers? The interactive guided tour through the Kupka exposition will be accompanied by an artistic workshop, dealing with the transition from figuration to abstraction.
Part II. Geometry Lesson
Think about three fundamental geometric shapes: the point, the bisector and the circle. These shapes serve as constituent elements for more complex geometric figures: squares, triangles, curves and their combinations. With the help of a point, line and circle we can also schematically draw a man, a sun or a house. It is possible to say, that the reality around us can be divided into such elementary shapes. And this is what František Kupka does with his abstract paintings: he reduces the concrete, figurative motif into a system of lines, points and circles. The participants of this program will search for the geometric motives in Kupka’s work. This geometric art will, finally, be compared to vital paintings such as the painting Cosmic Spring – Creation: not every reality can be reduced to geometry. There are forms in the universe that no basic shapes can describe. The interactive guided tour will be enriched by a creative workshop, where a geometric exercise will be transformed into an abstract artwork.
Part III. Man in the Universe
Is abstraction naturally connected to geometry? What about forms that cannot be reduced to geometrical shapes? What about life itself? Abstraction is generally divided into the geometric and the organic. In his work František Kupka mastered both and much more. Besides being a great patriot, Kupka was also a philosopher and spiritualist. He believed that the order of organic structures is equal in the microscopic dimension just as it is in the dimension of the Universe. The cells in a human body or in a stalk of a flower are, in terms of their organization, almost the same as the stars in heaven. While the western philosophers call this idea microcosm and macrocosm, their eastern colleagues summed it up simply as “as it is above, so it is below”. The third part of the Kupka & … cycle will investigate the secrets of the “cosmic” level of Kupka’s art. The program will be accompanied by a creative visual reflection on the motifs of the Universe in Kupka’s art.
* Is is possible to split larger groups in two parts. While the first group attends the Kupka program, an alternative program is offered to the second group. The groups can swop afterwards.
** All three parts of the Kupka & … program is possible to attend within one year at the most. We, however, do not recommend the time interval between the individual parts to be longer than one month.
