“On his return from the war – where he fought for France at the Somme and then, after injury, organized the Czechoslovakian anti-German resistance in Paris – Kupka immersed himself back in his research. At the time La cathédrale was painted, Kupka had just finished the translation into Czech of his treaty, La creation dans les arts plastiques, published finally in 1923 and one of the most important theoretical treatises ever published on abstract art, placing him in the company of fellow artists and theorists, Kandinsky, Malevich, and his lifelong friend Auguste Herbin. In it he does not ridicule or otherwise judge figural arts versus non-figural, distinguishing them simply as two categories: “On the one hand, there are those that attest to the deliberate seizing of impressions received from forms emerging from nature in a conscious way. On the other, however, there are those in which the painter of the sculptor requires us to decipher a speculative thought translated into a combination of plastic or chromatic elements […] .” (from La creation dans les arts plastiques, quoted in S. Fauchereau, Kupka, New York 1989, p. 19).”

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