Academic posing ‘in Black’: Drawings and illustrations by František Kupka

Abstract

This article analyses the representations of the ‘other’, especially the ‘black’ human figure, in the work of the Czech artist František Kupka, known as one of the first representatives of non-figurative art. As a satirical draughtsman and illustrator in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, he continued to treat these representations in an ‘academic’ manner without allusion to the formal systems of non-European art, as was the case of avant-garde artists. However, he followed modern, freethinking ideas and incorporated new content into his ‘modern allegories’. He shared these ideas above all with the social-anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, whose work L’Homme et la Terre, an Anthropocene history of the Earth, he illustrated and whose reflections are highly topical in our changing world. Nevertheless, for Kupka, as for Reclus, the philosophical aesthetic model remains in Ancient Greece, which was also the ideological source of the artist’s non-figurative concept.