The two works that will be discussed Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Tulip (1926) and Frantisek Kupka Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912). One was developed through an attempt to visualize music and the other is an abstraction of a flower there are similar principles guiding the work. Both pieces of works utilize blocks of color and lines to create a sense of motion. Abstraction is a form that takes objects and breaks it down to shapes and lines that inform the viewer about the basic components of the object. By looking at O’Keeffe’s Pink Tulip and Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, the abstraction used by both artists in the topic and the technique illustrates the development of modern art. The impact of the imagery of both works displays different perspectives and an attempt by artists to understand what is art.
Frantisek Kupka was a painter that was active in the art world during the early 1900s. Kupka was a painter from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and more specifically from what is now the Czech Republic. Kupka originally trained at the Prague Academy of Arts, but it was when he moved to Vienna when he started working with abstraction. Kupka believed that “abstract a
rt had to be more than simple pattern making and had to carry with it the didactic mission of earlier figurative painting; form needed to correspond to the idea,” (Shaw-Miller, 125). Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors is an oil painting that is about 7.2 feet by 6.9 feet. The “background” of the painting is black and white, with red and blue shapes, in a path, cross through the canvas. The painting is based on the movement of his stepdaughter and her ball along with the idea of giving music form. This painting is based on the music by the composer Bach.
“The development of the movement of the red and blue ball, from the painting Girl with a Ball, and his more general interest in studies of light, color, and motion, found a logical summation in a musical subject,” (Shaw-Miller, 132). Kupka’s work, his abstractions, was part of a movement to shed a dependence on literature in painting towards a subject matter that does not traditionally have forms, music. “The meaning is achieved through the art of composition, which links paintings to music through the concept of melody,” (Shaw-Miller, 128). There is a rhythm in the composition through the forms and colors, with the variation in the bright blue and red, in contrast with the arcs in the background, in large circular forms. The painting has no figures, but there is a sense of motion created by the contrast of forms and color.
MoMA site with several studies along with other work by Kupka.
Georgia O’Keeffe is an American painter who is known for her paintings of enlarged close-up of flowers in the 1920s. Her paintings depart from the machine age and the myths of modernity, were most paintings in America at this time seemingly looked to industry and machines for inspiration, (Foster, 225). Her paintings pointed the way to a distinctely American approach to abstraction, (Arnason, 372). Though the subject matter is evident in her paintings, the flowers take a different quality, due to the magnification; lines and forms create new patterns and new relationships. One thing that O’Keeffe’s work has to stand up to is her gender. Her work is often read as a sexually explicit by critiques, often seeing images of female genitalia, though O’Keeffe denies these assertions. The Pink Tulip is an oil painting that is 2.7 feet by 1 foot. The painting has pink petal shapes in the top with yellow curves at the right. There are yellow lines on the left that run diagonally up the side with straight blue-green strokes. The tulip fills up the whole pictorial space, which also flattens the work, an element of abstraction and modern art. “The framing of the object often rendered scale ambiguous and the identity of an object elusive. Combined with the practice of focusing on the centre of the flower or shell, it gave rise to images of uncompromising directness which disclose an eroticism with in the subject,” (Donagh, 46). The overtly sexual interpretations of her imagery diminishes the real importance, her work is read with the context of her gender. Her paintings where automatically read as a feminist or through her gender because of the choice of subject manner and the prevalence of sexism in art criticism, with the notation that she is a “woman painter” rather than just a painter, (Mitchell).
In both painting the use of color and forms are important elements that create a dynamic composition. The color choices, in Pink Tulip has to do with the subject manner, but the shapes created by the magnification, in turn has the eye of the viewer moving through the whole composition. Stepping away from the connotation of what exactly O’Keeffe is trying to depict allow for the forms within the painting to speak in a new manner. In a time when paintings tended to celebrate the man-made, the delicate yet strong lines created in the painting creates a level of abstraction with the subject matter still intact. Kupka’s movement through the blue and red part of the painting creates a different motion, there is a sort of rhythmic feeling, and the movement of music can be almost felt through the painting. The movement away from the figurative, though more extreme in Kupka’s case, into abstract and more modern art is seen in the flattening of pictorial space, and the layout of the composition. The subject and forms take up the entirety of the canvas. Fugue in Two Colors and Pink Tulip both take a subject and distill it to its essence, music and a flower respectively, to create works of art that change and morph into something else. Music is almost a purely non-figurative art; it is elements working together to create something that has no real form. The tulip in O’Keeffe’s painting though can read as female genitalia, is broken into pieces, to the point that critics have looked and wondered why she would do that, especially during a time where artists were painting testaments to the machine and technology. Kupka wondered why he should paint a tree, when people would pass them and see the magnificence of the actual subject on the way to the exhibition, (Shaw-Miller).
By looking at the two paintings together there is an understanding of the beginnings of abstraction from two different perspectives, and American and European. These two artists have created a place in art history for themselves, which is evident in these two pieces. Though these two paintings are not usually associated with each other, they do have a common place in art history, two examples of artists looking to create something captivating and something unique. Abstraction is an element both use and through the forms that both paintings contain, the viewer becomes drawn into them. The success in the paintings lies within the use of form and color to create a certain type of motion that is unexpected. The struggle in determining what direction visual art should take and ultimately did take is evident in the flattening of the space and the composition that both artists employ.
1. Arnason, H.H., and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art: Sixth Edition. London: Prentice Hall, 2010.
2. Donagh, Rita. “Georgia O’Keeffe in Context.” Oxford Art Journal 03.1 (1980): 44-50. JSTOR. Web. 20. April 2010.
3. Foster, Hal, et al. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. Thames & Hudson: New York, 2004.
4. Mitchell, Marilyn Hall. “Sexist Art Criticism: Georgia O’Keeffe: A Case Study.” Signs 03.3 (1976): 681-87. JSTOR. Web. 20 April 2010.
5. Shaw-Miller, Simon. Visual Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. Yale Univeristy: New Haven, 2002.
6. Zilezer, Judith. “Color Music: Synaethesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art.” Artibus et Historiae 08.16 (1987): 101-26. JSTOR. Web. 20. April 2010.
