Kupka: The Other Story of Modernity

This is the history of a revolutionary painter struggling against the prejudices of his time, and the relationships he maintained with the artists of his era. Over his 86-year lifespan,  Kupka (1871-1957) lived through one of the richest periods in the history of art - the early 20th century. This film sets out to render accessible to all the work of a painter who did not oppose the intellectual to the sensitive, nor artistic strategy to an artist’s spontaneous gestures. It provides a sensitive approach to abstraction, explaining how a few artists of the early 20th century - strangely all Slav and marked by Spiritism (Kupka, Kandinsky, Malevich) - managed to revolutionise painting by abandoning figuration in favour of a purer and freer relationship to the world of shape. (Arte)