Czech-born French pioneer of abstract painting and one of the first completely nonrepresentational artists. His mature works contributed much to the foundations of purely abstract painting in the 20th century.

Kupka, in his painting Disks of Newton (1912), and Robert Delaunay (Delaunay, Robert), in his similar Disks (1912), were the earliest exponents of curvilinear pure abstraction. This art was dubbed Orphism—an art of “musical” colour lyricism—by the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (Apollinaire, Guillaume) in 1912. Kupka painted abstractions with titles such as Fugue in Red and Blue (1912) that made explicit his belief that abstract colour, like music, is capable of evoking profound feeling.