Founding member of the Abstraction-Creation Group in Paris, 1930s.
In 1991 he studied in Vienna and, in 1895, in Paris, where he has lived ever since. He studied from Nature and greatly admired Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec. He undertook some important illustrative work: Lysistrata, Prometheus of Aeschylus and Les Erinnyes of Leconte de Lisle. He learnt Hebrew when commissioned by Élie Faure to make drawings for a new translation of the Song of Songs.
Kupka joined with his neighbour Jacques Villon in the meetings of the Section d'Or, in which a whole group of young Cubists were seeking the ideal proportions of a new painting. He was mentioned by Apollinaire as being among the Orphist painters and the creators of the art of the future. In 1913 the New York Times devoted an article to him in which he was quoted as saying: 'To people who claim that one cannot create forms or colours, I will reply that man has created the Ionic column and the Doric column and that architecture has constantly created forms with well-proportioned and fully justified modifications. . . . Man expresses his thoughts in words . . . Why not create in painting and sculpture, independently of the forms and colours which surround him?' A little later, in the preface to an album of abstract woodcuts, he wrote: 'The work of art, being in itself abstract reality, needs to be made up of invented elements'.
During the 1914-1918 war Kupka joined an infantry company before becoming an officer in the Czech Legion. Kupka volunteered for military service and fought on the Somme; he also did a good deal of propaganda work such as designing posters and was discharged with the rank of captain in 1919. The French poet Blaise Cendrars, his comrade in battle, has described their experiences in La Main Coupée. After the war Kupka continued his experiments, his expeditions to the extreme limits of knowledge.