Colors and music

100 years have gone by since a memorable concert took place in Vienna and this commemoration makes the exhibition at the Kampa Museum in Prague timely: "Abstraction and Atonality" presents three artists, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). It is a low key but powerful event. Small, early works from Kandinsky have been assembled, and it is a delight to look at his woodcuts, watercolors from 1911, 1913, with themes of his natal Russia, fairytales, horses running in the countryside, peasants and noblewomen. The progression to abstract culminates by the end of the exhibition with Impression V, 1911, a colorful oil painting.


Paintings from Schoenberg, the composer, occupy a whole room, self-portraits, hands and eyes, fascinating, bulging, like thoughts and brain were trying to escape the skull through the sockets. His paintings are dark, somber, romantic, with a flavor of Edward Munch. Schoenberg himself decided to curtail his painting and concentrate on his musical career.

Colors always stayed his subject when composing music and he created a musical scale of colors. This is well documented with scores of music like "Yellow Sound". The historical significance of these little pieces of paper cannot be enough emphasized. Schoenberg and Kandinsky's work cristallize the research in synesthesia.
How does Kupka fit in the exhibition? His works are on permanent display at the museum and this exhibition provides the occasion to show his paintings in a different light. Born in eastern Bohemia, he was trained at the Prague Art Academy and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Art in Paris, where he moved in his early twenties. He spent most of his productive life in Paris.

He was interested in using colors and free them from shapes, and his search for abstract develops in front of our eyes, with his colorwheels displayed at the exhibition. The guard, a very persuasive older lady "invited me" (pulled a chair and ordered me to sit) and brought a book in English about Kupka. Full of pride she pointed out to pages about the painter, photographs, and more. Kupka is one more artist brought back home, the Czech Republic is claiming its artists.

The exhibition assembled works from private collections, the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kampa Museum which contains more than 200 paintings from Kupka.

Kampa Museum, photograph by the author

"Self-Portrait", Arnold Schoenberg, 1910

"The Kathedrala", Frantisek Kupka, 1912-1913

"Impression V", Wassily Kandinsky, 1911

Along the Vltava river

The walk to the Kampa Museum located on the bank of the Vltava river in Prague is very romantic, especially a month ago, with all the colored foliage. The island is a park, and the building hosting the museum has a long history starting in 1393. It used to be a water mill, of course was damaged during wars, burned, was rebuilt...and after more recent incidents was finally acquired by the City of Prague which allowed the museum to open in 2003. It looks like the week-end residence of a rich aristocrat, with its main building hosting the permanent collections and the Stables exhibition hall, the temporary exhibitions.
Meda and Jan Mladek, Czech-American collectors, contributed to most of the permanent collection, which includes more than 200 works from

Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) and sculptures from Otto Gutfreund (1889-1927). These two Czech artists' works occupy two levels of the museum and are displayed in a chronological order. Kupta's path is a history of the abstract movement and the Parisian life. I discovered Gutfreund and his cubist sculptures like "Don Quixote" (1911-12), or Cellist (1912-13), dynamic, full of character, powerful. It is poignant to look at his post-war works, academic, emotionless, like the artist had disappeared from his works. He was well-known then, professor at the College of Decorative Arts in Prague. He drowned in the Vltava river in 1927.

The permanent collection of Central and Eastern European artists is rich with hundreds of paintings, sculptures, drawings from Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian artists from the 60's to the 80's and later years. Several donors added works to this already rich collection, including George Soros.

In the Stable exhibition hall, next to the museum, a temporary exhibition was dedicated to Ladislav Novak (1925-1999), who is an original Czech artist. An action painter of a kind, he created "Decollages", "Fumages" and the famous "Froissages", creating a dreamlike world. A fairy like, lonely character is the center of a story, and annotations in French are inscribed with a pencil at the bottom of the works, giving clues about the character depicted. The works could be the illustrations for a book.

One cannot escape the history surrounding these works. Most artists , living in exile or in hiding, could not be silenced and this museum is a testimony to the power of their creativity.

A quote from Jan Mladek is encrypted on the entrance of the Kampa Museum: " If a nation's culture survives, so does the nation". The Czech Republic should fare well.

"Madame Kupka among verticals" (1910-1911) Frantisek Kupka

"Don Quixote" (1911-1912) Otto Gutfreund

photograph by the author:

"Rose" (1978) Ladislav Novak

view of one room, permanent collection at the Kampa Museum