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Although he moved to Paris at a young age, Frantisek Kupka’s Bohemian origins, mysticism, and eccentric personality kept him at a distance from the avant-garde circles of the artistic capital. An individualist, he rejected association with any stylistic school or trend, but his paintings’ aggressive palette and dependence on color as a means of faceting form and conveying meaning show undeniable affinities with Fauvism and the work of Henri Matisse, as well as with Orphism, Robert Delaunay’s color-based brand of Cubism. A devoted mystic, Kupka spent his life in search of a transcendental other reality, or “fourth dimension.” One of the first nonobjective artists, he extended his clairvoyant practice to his art as well, by uniting a metaphysical investigation of the human body and nature with daring color and abstract form.
Theosophy—a synthesis of philosophy, religion, and science—guided Kupka’s holistic approach to art. His paintings draw on a variety of sources, including ancient myths, color theory, and contemporary scientific developments. The invention of radiography at the turn of the 20th century was especially significant for Kupka, whose search for an alternative dimension through a kind of painterly X-ray vision is captured in his monumental Planes by Colors, Large Nude. He produced at least 18 preliminary sketches for the work and probably six others after its completion; by 1906, he had almost certainly executed an initial large-scale oil study of the composition. In the Guggenheim’s work, the highly finished quality of the background suggests that Kupka may well have completed it after the rest of the canvas. It also seems that he added the 1909 date and signature much later. Considering an exhibition label written in the artist’s handwriting on the reverse, which notes the years 1905-10 (a span that indicates initial conceptualization to completion), the final date of the work is most likely 1910.
Over the course of the painting’s development Kupka was fortunate to work with one model as his subject: his wife, Eugénie. The artist rendered her form in vivid shades of purple, green, yellow, and blue and devised an innovative modeling technique based on color, rather than line or shade, to render her body as sections of colored planes in such a way that her "inner form" is made visible, a technique that is closely related to that of his Family Portrait (National Gallery, Prague), completed around the same time. By revealing interior states through color, Kupka achieved a painterly solution to his spiritual quest for a fourth dimension. This unveiling of the unseen is crucial for Kupka, who believed that it is only through the senses, through physical experience, that we can reach an extrasensory, metaphysical dimension and thereafter achieve an intuitive understanding of the universal scheme underlying existence.
Planes by Colors, Large Nude (Plans par couleurs, grand nu), 1909-10. Oil on canvas, 59 1/8 X 71 1/8 inches. Gift, Mrs. Andrew P. Fuller 68.1860.
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