Detail of Mme Kupka among Verticals by Kupka in the Museum of Modern Art, March 2010

František Kupka
Mme Kupka among Verticals
1910-11

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 53 3/8 x 33 5/8" (135.5 x 85.3 cm)

Credit: Hillman Periodicals Fund

Object number: 563.1956

A vibrantly colored, tightly packed procession of uneven verticals nearly envelops a face painted in markedly nonnaturalistic shades of green and purple. Kupka would later say that to make this painting he had reworked an unfinished portrait of his wife, laying in strokes of color around her face until it was all but obscured by their boldly flat pattern—a method suggesting a literal assault on figuration.-- Gallery label from Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.


Text from: www.moma.org/collection/works/79971