Kupka painting sold at record price

A painting by the abstract artist Frantisek Kupka broke the local auction record for a work by a Czech painter when it was sold for 13.4 million crowns (around 643,000 dollars) at a Prague auction on Sunday. The starting price for the work, "Abstract Composition," was 8.5 million crowns. The previous record for a Czech painting auctioned locally was set last December when a collector paid 9.3 million crowns for a work by Josef Capek, who was a cubist before developing his own primitive style in the 1920's and 1930's.