More Kupka at Kampa Museum

The Kampa Museum's already rich collection of artworks by František Kupka, a seminal Czech abstract painter who spent most of his life in France, will soon be even richer, as the museum has purchased the collection of American art historian Lilli Lonngren Anders.

"In total, it is 41 works of art, including an interesting oil painting, Portrait of Kupka's Step-daughter Andrée (1906), which foreshadows his later abstract period," says Jiří Machalický, curator of the Kampa Museum.

The museum foundation paid half a million U.S. dollars for the collection, which many consider a very good price for the oil paintings, drawings, studies and documents.

Should a competition for the most influential painter of the 20th-century avant-garde ever be held, only a few names would be considered, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, all of whom are today some of the most expensive artists on the market.

Though he may not be as internationally recognized as those names, Kupka commands high prices around the world. For instance, in March 2009, Kupka's painting Zhroucení vertikál (Breakdown of Verticals) from 1935 was sold for nearly 26 million Kč.

"This past summer, Kupka's painting Movement from the Hascoe Collection sold for 43 million Kč, but this painting didn't go to the Czech Republic; the buyer was foreign," says Jan Skřivánek, editor-in-chief of Art & Antiques magazine.

"The thing with Kupka is there are only a few oil paintings on the market, and he is not frequently a part of auctions. Kupka's paintings appear rarely. This fact undermines the price rise. This is not the case of, say, Picasso, whose paintings are not rare on the market," Skřivánek adds.

Kupka's paintings can easily find buyers on the market, but studies and graphics are a harder sell, as there have been cases of counterfeit pieces in the past, and buyers are now generally cautious.

The authenticity of the collection purchased by the Kampa Museum, however, is not up for dispute. Lonngren Anders met the elderly Czech painter before his death in 1957 as she "was a young art historian sent to Paris by former Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred Barr Jr., who considered Kupka the first abstract painter and wanted to find out what was his basis, starting points, how he got to the abstraction," Machalický says.

Included in the collection are also some documents and original catalogs of Kupka's exhibitions, some with Kupka's own notes about prices, which are perfect material for further studies. Though the collection contains mainly works on paper and small studies, which are not even watercolors but simply drawings that would be not as easy to sell as large paintings, for a museum it is perfect material.

"It is a superb collection, and one of the reasons Lonngren Anders sold it for such a good price was she wanted to keep the collection together and also pass it on to some museum where Kupka is the main star," Skřivánek says.   

Kupka was born in 1871 in Opočno, east Bohemia, and first studied to be a saddler. The young man soon established a small painting workshop and then went on to study painting at the Prague Art Academy in 1886. Later, he studied in Vienna, and then he moved to Paris to attend the famous École des Beaux-Arts. In 1905, he moved to Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, where he died in 1957.

The Kampa Museum opened in September 2001, and since then has become an important part of the Prague art scene. The museum shows the Central European art collection that Jan and Meda Mládek amassed in their American exile, together with the collection of Jiří and Běla Kolář and works by Jindřich Chalupecký as well as temporary exhibitions. Also in the permanent collection are a large number of works by Otto Gutfreund and, of course, František Kupka.

Filip Šenk can be reached at
fsenk@praguepost.com