Madame Kupka between verticals 1911

Curator: We are looking at František Kupka's “Madame Kupka between verticals,” an oil on canvas completed in 1911. Its current home is the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Curator: At first glance, it’s like a stained-glass window...but then you realize there's a portrait struggling to emerge from behind this riot of vertical strokes. The painting has such dynamism, with all these colours striving to form coherence. Curator: Precisely! The painting showcases a departure from representational accuracy to the abstract using blocks of vivid colors and bold brushstrokes to deconstruct and reconstruct the subject's form. Look closely at the structural interplay. The artist employs the vertical elements to almost obscure the figure but not entirely, which speaks to his interest in challenging the viewer’s perception. Curator: Speaking of perception, it is fascinating to think about the means to achieve this effect. The thick application of oil paint must add a certain tactile dimension when viewed in person. It certainly signals Kupka's radical experimentation with materiality, pushing beyond the mere representation of reality. I wonder about his studio and what other works occupied him at the time. Curator: Indeed. The influence of Orphism, a style of abstract painting, is very palpable here. You see Kupka’s movement into complete abstraction in his later works, as he believed in expressing pure emotion and thought through the very arrangement of form and colour. There’s something so philosophically deep here. Curator: I agree. Consider also the labor and materials involved—pigments ground, canvas prepared, brushstrokes layered one after another. These all stand testament to the physical act of creating, turning matter into a vessel for thought and emotion, an exercise which, one way or another, brings us into the socio-economic structures of the day. Curator: A thought-provoking observation indeed! Kupka, through his revolutionary visual language, successfully transformed the genre of portraiture to encompass movement, music and abstraction, a bold divergence that demands an attentive audience. Curator: Indeed, one wonders how society, and even Madame Kupka herself, perceived this painting upon its initial unveiling, offering not a mirror but an abstract interpretation, that leaves the burden of perceiving squarely upon our own senses.