Moving to Paris in 1896 allowed Kupka to depart from Viennese influence for a time and paint with a new perspective. Kupka arrived at abstraction with the realization that “it was possible to experience great joy and excitement in the mere contemplation of colours and lines” and the desire to create paintings that effected the viewer the way music did. The Nazarenes also thought that contemplation and philosophical thought was essential to art. They believed that artwork should produce an effect on the viewer similar to that experienced when listening to religious music. The Nazarenes wanted to create work that recalled the monumental spiritual artwork of Germany during the Middle Ages. Kupka was trained by Nazarene artists in Prague and Vienna. While other artists later developed a theory of abstraction to explain their work, Kupka first thought up his theory and then put it into practice. Kupka was not a Cubist like Picabia, Gleizes, or Metzinger, as his abstract work did not have its origins in Cubism, though he was associated and exhibited with them. As Hajo Düchting writes, Apollinaire used the term Orphism to describe “a new kind of joyously sensuous art, whose roots were in Cubism and which had a tendency towards abstraction.” Orphism also alluded to the myth of Orpheus and referenced the artist’s creative innovation through the sensuous interplay of color and light and color and music. The influential art critic Guillaume Apollinaire labeled Kupka as an Orphic artist, and Kupka claimed to begin his Orphic artwork in 1911. Though his role in the advent of abstract art is given much less emphasis, his work is just as crucial as that of the more celebrated abstractionists including Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Delaunay. Kupka was an abstract artist who lived during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The large black space between the two clusters of the shapes, and the arching of the top of the right cluster, brings to the viewer’s mind two stained glass windows illuminated by light in a dark cathedral. These rectilinear shapes are composed of blocks of black, white, and a range of blue, red, purple, gray, and brown color. The diagonal lines run from the top left to the bottom right and from the top right to the bottom left of the painting. Vertical lines, running the entire length of the canvas are intersected by diagonal lines to form rectilinear shapes of various sizes. This painting is one of a series of abstract works that Kupka termed Vertical and Diagonal Planes. The painting is a part of the permanent Jan and Meda Mládek collection of Museum Kampa in Prague, Czech Republic. The medium is oil on canvas, and the painting’s dimensions are 180 × 150 cm. The Cathedral ( Katedrála) is an abstract painting created by Czech artist František Kupka in 1912–13.
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