The Collector KAREL KUPKA IN NORTH AUSTRALIA

That morning, though, his quest was just beginning, he was full of intuitions and excitement, and the mood is evident in his writings from those days, which are alive with a restrained joy and a sense of impending fulfilment. Their tone may also owe something to the broken pattern of Kupka's earlier life, to his long-frustrated artistic ambitions, to his many displacements and his constantly reviving belief that the sublime was close at hand. This trajectory of yearnings had been set since childhood.

He was born in the last year of World War I, in Prague, the capital of the newly formed Czechoslovakia, into a family with strong connections among the intelligentsia. The cubist painter Frantisek Kupka, well known in Central Europe, was a relation of his; his cousin Jiri became a prominent writer during communist times. During his schooldays Kupka was dispatched by his art-loving father on brief study trips to Paris, where he began painting in his turn and felt the first stirrings of a lifelong interest in prehistoric man. With this background, his pronounced gift for languages and his liberal education, Kupka's path ahead in life seemed smooth; and he was already well into his studies at Charles University when, abruptly, a shadow many of his fellow-countrymen had long dreaded fell. The German army invaded and annexed Czechoslovakia; the occupiers shut down the university; there were protests, and Kupka took part; they were harshly suppressed. His father was able to find him a mid-level post at Rolnicka, an agricultural-insurance firm, where he survived the wartime years, painting, from time to time, small, sentimental landscapes of peasant huts.

It was only late in 1945, well after the liberation of Prague, that Kupka was able to devise a strategy of return to a country that had grown sweeter in his mind with each new year of absence. He enlisted in an army unit bound for Le Havre, transferred to a post in the Czechoslovak embassy in Paris, and started to live a straitened life. He began a doctorate, rather fittingly on aspects of the law of international transport; but most of his time was spent at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he worked in the studio of the muralist Jean Souverbie.

When Kupka turned to those days in conversations with visitors in years to come, he passed over the politics of the time and the communist takeover in Prague, which confirmed him in his choice of adopted home. Instead, he would remember his creative exploits: the watercolours he dashed off in the Place du Tertre for passers-by; the elaborate paintings he exhibited in the yearly salons for young artists; his translation of Fernande Olivier's memoir of her time with Picasso. Some of his early Paris sketches survive: they are executed in pastel, with a tell-tale preference for deep hues of mauve or indigo and a tendency towards a fragmentation of the visual field, for he had already come under the influence of the Left Bank avant-garde.