Biographies

Othone Coubine (1883 – 1969)

He was born near Boskovice in Moravia, originally named Otokar (or Otakar) Kubin, but changed the spelling of his name when he moved to France. From 1898 to 1900 he studied painting in the town of Horice in eastern Czechoslovakia. In 1903 he toured France and Italy, returning home in 1904 to enter the School of Fine Arts in Prague. In 1907-1908 he joined the visual artists group OSMA (The Eight) and participated in an exhibition of its members, with Vincenc Benes, Emil Filla, Antonin Prochazka, Bohumil Kubista, Max Horb, Willy Nowak and Bedrich Feigl in Prague. This group broke with traditional academic methods and followed the fauvists and then the cubists, though Coubine later returned to more representational forms. In 1912 he left Czechoslovakia and settled in Paris under his frenchified name. From 1913 to 1916 he exhibited at the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. After the war he settled in Provence, painting mainly landscapes and becoming a French citizen in 1926, returning to Czechoslovakia from 1951 to 1964, before finally coming back to France for the last years of his life.