The Cathedral (Katedrála)

The painting is a part of the permanent Jan and Meda Mládek collection of Museum Kampa in Prague, Czech Republic.

These rectilinear shapes are composed of blocks of black, white, and a range of blue, red, purple, gray, and brown color.

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.

[1] 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.”[2] 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.

[3] 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.

[8] Kupka was not only concerned with formal elements like line, color, and shape, and their manipulation with light, but also with spiritual, cosmological, biological, and musical forces.

He felt that through art, one could achieve “another reality.”[9] Kupka sought to transfer his heightened consciousness to his paintings so that the viewer might also reach elevated thought.