Masters of World Art - Kupka & Gutfreund at Kampa Museum

František Kupka (1871–1957) is among the most important representatives of world art of the 20th century - he is one of the founders of modern abstract painting and currently the most expensive Czech artist of all time. The collection of his works forms one of the main pillars of the collection of Jan and Meda 
Mládek. Among other things, it very well maps Kupka's path to non-figurative art in the first years of the 20th century. A number of oil paintings in the collection also include drawing studies, which in Kupka's case demonstrate a well-thought-out path to the final work.

The permanent exhibition of František Kupka, which is divided into seven chapters, chronologically presents Kupka’s work from the mid-1890s to the mature works of the 1950s. The viewer can thus observe individual phases of Kupka’s concentrated analysis of individual painting elements – line, surface, light values and colour, including an important phase of Kupka’s development, when he defined his concept of colour planes. This enabled him to develop a different form of structuring the surface of a painting. Apart from the paintings in Meda Mládek’s collection, the exhibition is complemented by several paintings from public and private collections, particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, a period which Meda did not concentrate so much on in her collecting activities. More than seventy works are exhibited: besides the gems of Museum Kampa’s collection (Amorfa – Warm Chromatic, 1912; The Cathedral, 1912–1913; The Form of Yellow, 1919–1923), other key works on display include The Bookworm (Le Bibliomane), 1897 (Prague Castle Collection); Distillation Apparatus (l’alambic), 1929 (private collection); Plan Violet, 1954 (private collection), etc.

The 8th and last chapter of the new permanent exhibition is dedicated to Otto Gutfreund (1889–1927). Museum Kampa’s collection comprises 17 sculptures and a number of drawings and designs. Visitors can view iconic works of both Czech Expressionism and Cubism (Anxiety, 1911– 1912; Cubist Bust, 1913–1914; Viki, 1912–1913) and sculptures from the period of Civilism that Gutfreund joined in building a new visual style for the first Czechoslovakian Republic (for example studies for the sculptures Trade and Industry, both from 1923).