Getty Museum

Girl Shading Her Eyes

Date

about 1908

Medium

Pastel, on wove paper

Culture

Czech

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

First trained in Prague under a painter influenced by the Nazarenes (a school of German Romantic artists), František Kupka continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eventually he moved to Paris, where he became a pioneer of European abstraction. With its simple figurative subject, this vibrant pastel reflects the artist's experiments with optical phenomena--especially the chromatic effects of shade. The blues, violets, and greens radiate with vital energy, owing to the artist's ambition to transform nature into an alternate reality.

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