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AB - In his 1950 anecdotal overview of abstract art, Michel Seuphor offers a revealing account of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941): He was, at first sight, a ‘bon vivant’ of the most current French type. But then this man would assault you with arguments and demonstrations, repeating twenty times the same quotations from Apollinaire or the same trite studio jargon; one was faced with an obsessed being […] He had a way of throwing basic truths at you – ‘The world is round, my dear fellow, the world is round’ – which left you destroyed, stultified and without reply. Besides a reply would not have mattered: Delaunay was incapable of listening, the clamor of his conviction, the simple idea in him was too strong […] I haven’t ever known a man of such disarming candor, or such an exasperating verbosity and some other qualities of this kind, the sum of which made for a very great painter.1 Seuphor was clearly left spinning by Delaunay’s rhetoric. But he raises a central problem with interpretations of the painter: while Robert Delaunay was undoubtedly part of what has retrospectively come to be understood as the pre-First World War ‘discovery’ of abstraction, neither his words nor his paintings seem to offer a satisfactory explanation of that innovation’s importance. Theoretical and historical commentaries have largely agreed that Delaunay’s statements (and even some of his artworks) ought to be disregarded. For example, Herschel Chipp declared: ‘Delaunay’s own writings on color, although influenced by scientists and theoreticians, are intuitive and sometimes random statements’.2 The more historical studies of Sherry Buckberrough, Virginia Spate, and David Cottington have each claimed that Delaunay was a closet Unanimist, Bergonsonian, or Futurist, despite the fact that Delaunay repeatedly and explicitly sought to differentiate himself from those groups.3 On a parallel track, Gordon Hughes and Pascal Rousseau locate the source of Delaunay’s style in contemporary science and technology.4 This approach privileges only one facet of Delaunay’s production, leading Hughes to discount the fact that until the 1930s most of Delaunay’s work was figurative and Rousseau to ignore the artist’s intense connection to nature. Writers of a theoretical bent including Thierry de Duve, Rosalind Krauss, and Georges Roque implicitly question Delaunay’s intellect and base their unfavourable judgements on what they see as the artist’s failure to understand one variant of Structuralist thought or another.5 They locate the value of modern art in its capacity to unmask the mechanisms of representation and thus fault Delaunay for failing to comprehend what was happening beneath the surface. In short, across the historiography, there is a shared sense that the artist did not quite ‘get’ what he was doing. Yet, Delaunay’s logic was systematic. He consistently referenced the law of simultaneous contrast as it was described by Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889). For example, he writes: ‘At this moment, about 1912 to 1913, I had the idea for a kind of painting that would depend technically only on color and its contrast … I used Chevreul’s scientific words: simultaneous contrast’ (emphasis in original).6 Chevreul and his 1839 tome On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors and the Combination of Colored Objects According to that Law in Painting, the Gobelins Tapestries, Beauvais Tapestries for Furniture, Carpets, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Cloth, Printing, Lighting, Interior Design, Clothing, and Horticulture are among the most recognised names in colour theory.7 The text went into numerous editions and versions and was published in nearly every European language. The scientist’s presence in Paris at the same moment as some of the most important nineteenth-century colourists has led, as Georges Roque has pointed out, to both an over-estimation of Chevreul’s influence on them and misinterpretations of his theory.8 Scholars have determined that Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863),9 Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890),10 and the Neo-Impressionist circle around Georges Seurat (1859–1891),11 among many others, were aware of Chevreul’s ideas. Yet, these master colourists developed systems quite different from the main thrust of the scientist’s studies. This has caused several popular misconceptions about Chevreul, or to put it in the more pointed terms of Roque, it seems as if art historians have failed to read On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast carefully, if at all.12 Among the misreadings, the idea of optical mixing holds the most sway. Delacroix on occasion and Seurat almost exclusively used small dots of different colours placed side-by-side to produce a third colour in the eye and/or create an experience of light. However, that technique gets only a brief mention by Chevreul, where it is seen as a byproduct of distance, so his work does not provide a justification of that method. Similarly, the intensity of van Gogh’s combinations of colours, which were no doubt influenced by Delacroix, is contrary to Chevreul’s stated intentions. While van Gogh’s compositions often take the form of groupings of complementary hues that heighten the difference between colours and create an expressive rather than mimetic effect, the theorist did not want his simultaneous contrast to be used in that way. Privileging mimesis and harmony above contrast and expression, Chevreul’s tastes in painting were conservative and his technical insights for that medium were couched in terms of perfecting the techniques taught in the Académie des Beaux-Arts by studying the effects of colour combination. Coming to Chevreul after the scientist’s death, with a desire to differentiate himself from both those earlier colourists and the linear developments going on around him, Robert Delaunay found something very different in the former’s work. A text that the artist edited for Blaise Cendrars (and that he eventually partially published under his own name) sums up Delaunay’s abundant and wide-ranging claims for Chevreul: Our eyes extend to the sun. This contrast is not that of a black and white, but on the contrary, is a dissimilarity. The art of today is the art of profundity. The word simultaneity is a term of métier. Delaunay employs it when he works with everything: harbor, houses, men, women, toy, window, book; when he is in Paris, New York, Moscow; in bed or outside. Simultaneity is a technique, simultaneous contrast is the newest perfection of this métier and technique. Simultaneous contrast is from the most profound point of view – reality – form – construction – representation – life. Its profundity is new inspiration. One is aware in this profundity that I am there – the senses are there – and the spirit.13 The law of simultaneous contrast, which is a series of observations about the visual effects of colour combinations, takes on the status of an all-encompassing organisational schema in this passage. It spans art and experience, ranging from books to cities to the sun while also traversing the mental–physical divide. These disparate artistic, physical, and theoretical spaces are all tied to Chevreul’s hemisphere and its rounded arrangement of colour relationships. Unlike his predecessors, the artist looked to Chevreul’s On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast for answers to questions about pictorial space, definitions of space and time, and how to understand the urban space around him. In short, Delaunay used Chevreul’s theories to create a system of representation, one that complicates traditional understandings of the pre-First World War French avant-garde. The First Frontier Assigned to the Laon regiment as a librarian, Delaunay spent his military service (1907–08) studying Chevreul, as well as reading Baruch Spinoza. By that point, Delaunay had been painting professionally for four years, and dreaming of doing so for a decade or more. He had integrated himself into what would become the Parisian Cubist milieu, establishing a friendship with Jean Metzinger, attending Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau’s soirées, and completing a portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s rival and Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s soon-to-be husband, the dealer Willem Uhde. His own work was still under the spell of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, and while it was colouristically bold, it lacked what Delaunay would later call a ‘constructive’ force.14 The impetus for his sustained reading of Chevreul, which had probably already begun by 1905, was certainly the aesthetics of colour, but the text’s interest in space alongside the work of his Cubist colleagues would ultimately lead to a much broader application of the theory. While Delaunay’s early work embraces the heightened colours of Fauvism and appears to suggest a steady progress to his signature style, a brief interlude in the early teens undermines the idea that the painter was only interested in the decorative or emotional aspects of saturated hue. Around 1909, Delaunay moved into what he called his ‘destructive’ phase, during which he worked on the Saint Séverin (1909–10), Tower (1909–12), City (1909–11), and at least part of the Windows (1912–14) series. The dominant palette of all but the last of these cycles is grey, and they show a sustained interest in the depiction of space. The emergence of Cubism undoubtedly influenced this shift; though Delaunay, always one to assert his independence from the contemporary milieu, only verbally acknowledged the influence of Paul Cézanne. In 1909 he became friends with Albert Gleizes and the next year he made the pilgrimage to Kahnweiler’s gallery to see Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s Analytic works. These influences help explain the fact that at the dawn of the new decade Delaunay briefly withdrew from saturated hues and focused on depicting space. The Saint Séverin and Tower series investigate the limits of a linear mode of representing three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, and they ultimately led Delaunay to develop an alternative system. The interior of the church of Saint Séverin (largely built in the early thirteenth century) provides visitors with the disorienting experience of a full Gothic apse compressed into approximately forty metres. Sightlines are cut off, arches meet at such odd angles that they seem to lean, and it is nearly impossible to find a distanced point-of-view from which to observe the whole building. Delaunay repeatedly depicted this complex locale, and his paintings reveal the impossibility of aligning the system of linear perspective with a rounded and visually truncated space. Traditionally, the perspectival system would be displayed on the floor where a regular grid could be drawn back to the vanishing point, but Saint Séverin provides no such checkerboard. Its irregular flooring seems to have been a source of difficulty for Delaunay since that area varies the most throughout the series.15 Lacking a predefined grid on which to place the rest of the elements of the scene, Delaunay is forced to rely on the repetition of vertical forms as a way of conveying depth, and throughout the series the painter subtly adjusts their orientation. Those modifications almost always involve straightening the piers so that they form an orthogonal, which is what makes Number Five (1909, Fig. 1) so interesting. There, in lieu of forcing the outer (right-hand) columns into a diagonal line, Delaunay allows them to curve inward, especially where they meet the ground. What, in earlier versions, had been a series of columns fitted to a diagonal line has become an irregular play of arcs. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Saint Séverin, Number Five, The Rainbow, 1909, oil on canvas, 58.5 x 38.5 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Saint Séverin, Number Five, The Rainbow, 1909, oil on canvas, 58.5 x 38.5 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This shift was no doubt inspired by the floor plan of the church; yet, the resulting curves provided an alternative to linear perspective. A comparable slope is added to the left-hand side, creating an oval frame. This rounded form with its extension off the edge of the canvas is aligned with the viewer’s visual field, and the dark curve on the lower right not only evokes a sense of peripheral vision, it indicates that the spectator is looking into a space that s/he does not inhabit. With this link between the curved piers and field of view established, the other arches can be associated with alternative positions and visions. The contrasts between the arcs cause the viewer to imagine moving through the area and seeing different things. For example, the next arch, which runs from the pier nearest the picture plane up off the edge of the canvas and comes back into the space slightly blocked by the right-hand wall, is aligned with neither the first oval nor the centre of the canvas. To make that internal frame coincide with the viewer’s sight lines, one would have to move into the space, step to the left, and angle the body towards the right. Delaunay encourages this imaginative travel by highlighting the floor at precisely the place that would become visible through that movement. An even greater shift in position and larger opening of space is produced by the arch that runs nearly perpendicular to the picture plane on the left-hand side of the canvas. Requiring a ninety degree turn to be brought into alignment, the lack of further linear elements and the concentrated modelling of the area suggest that this position would provide a much broader view. Subtle differences in the arches evoke large spatial distinctions, and the viewer begins to infer expansion from the contrast between different curves. In Saint Séverin, Delaunay had found a subject that did not fit into the system of linear perspective. By rounding linear elements and privileging comparison rather than succession, he began to develop an alternative to traditional perspective. Proof that Delaunay later understood these curves to be an essential part of his method can be found in the reworked portion of Saint Séverin, Number Seven (c.1909–10/1915). The artist has placed a set of highly coloured, concentric circles on the floor of the church, thereby laying claim to precisely the space that had rendered perspective a problem and replacing the traditional perspectival checkerboard with three-dimensional curves. These forms, which will characterise his style from the 1913 Sun and Moon series on, appear nowhere else in the Saint Séverin works. It is as if the painter returned to this canvas in order to acknowledge the origin of his later style. A parallel destruction of the perspectival grid can be found in the Tower series, where Delaunay takes on the challenge of height. As Buckberrough has noted, a three-hundred-meter tall structure does not lend itself to a regular diminution of scale.16 If the problem posed by Saint Séverin was a lack of straight lines, the issue created by the Eiffel Tower was the impossibility of establishing a proportional decrease in the size of objects to show their distance from the viewer. When, as in this series, Delaunay allows the structure to almost reach both the top and the bottom of the canvas, the traditional techniques for representing space yield eccentric results. The buildings and trees surrounding the tower tend to equal its height. Meant to be framing devices that establish a near-ground and therefore distance the viewer from the subject matter, in these works they often envelope the tower and fill the picture plane. Delaunay’s visions of the tower and its surroundings seem to warp space. Take, for example, the Guggenheim’s Eiffel Tower from 1911 (Fig. 2). The simplification and rearrangement of objects in this work has often been connected to Gallery Cubism. However, those resemblances do not indicate a shared approach. Here Cubist faceting is not, as in Picasso and Braque’s work, a function of the objects, and Delaunay is not geometricising or breaking things into pieces. Nor is the painter willing to distribute facets throughout the canvas. Instead, the pictorial space itself is changing, as the perspectival framework collapses into the centre of the canvas. Forced by his subject matter to work with an excessively compressed grid – the viewing point would need to be far away to allow the observer to take in the entire tower, which means that the horizontal lines produced by a proportional diminution of scale would be very close together – and to place his vanishing point in the middle of the very object he wanted to depict, Delaunay was left with a perspectival system that no longer resembled three-dimensional space. Even the artist acknowledged that the fallout was ‘catastrophic’.17 The tower is foreshortened by both the grid emerging from the top of the canvas and the one governed by divisions of the bottom; thus, not only does the base of the tower appear to angle back, its top seems to project forward. The resultant crumbling of space into a hole between the first and second storeys of the tower brings its surroundings down with it. The framing buildings are angled out towards the edge of the canvas until they reach the level of the vanishing point, where they begin to slant inward. The resulting diamond is full of diagonal lines (would-be orthogonals) that also point towards the central region. Everything appears to be collapsing. To see this as either an expressive deformation or an attempt to superimpose the various sides of the object is to ignore the artist’s search for a system that would fit this structure into the space of the picture. The Tower series displays the tension between linear perspective and its subject, and the ‘destruction’ seen in these works stems from the incompatibility of the two.18 Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1911, oil on canvas, 202 x 138 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1911, oil on canvas, 202 x 138 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. Perhaps because of this failure, curves have a role to play in the Tower series as well. Whether they are occasioned by trees, clouds, curtains, or the structure’s arches, rounded forms help to reconfigure space. An undated page of sketches (Fig. 3) in the Delaunay archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France reveals the connection between the arches of Saint Séverin and the Tower compositions. Clearly a comparative study of the organisation of various canvases, the lower band can be read as a progressive development. Starting from the repeated arches of the church, Delaunay attempts to bend the buildings around the Eiffel Tower so that they form the same kind of framing device. This not only suggests that Delaunay had come to see curves as a way of organising any space that would not conform to linear perspective, it marks a shift from bending lines in order to depict a literally rounded space to using curvature to evoke depth. (The tower and its surroundings are, after all, largely rectilinear.) In the third composition on the page, the arcs are freed from their framing role and superimposed on top of the tower. Responding, perhaps, to the folding of the structure produced by perspectival rending, curvilinear scribbles sever the top of the edifice from its base. This sketch closely resembles the 1910 Eiffel Tower with Trees (Fig. 4), which is a cataclysmic version of the staid 1909 depiction of the Tower and the old Trocadéro on the verso of Saint Séverin, Number Four. In these images, the curves of the trees and the tower establish a sense of distance. A large branch is placed on top of the shaft at roughly the level of the second storey in order to stop the upper portion of the structure from projecting forwards as it moves into the sky. This is especially important in the latter, more perspectival version, since it covers some of the destruction of the edifice. That single large leaf is, however, an extension of a larger system of rounded frames. The rest of the trees create an arch (or half of one in the case of Eiffel Tower with Trees) near the viewer, which is echoed by the arches of the tower. In both paintings, the rounded base of the structure encloses another view, one meant to be understood as even farther from the picture plane than the tower itself. As in Saint Séverin, Number Five, these arcs are linked to an imaginative movement through the pictorial space. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, sketches, n.d. Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, sketches, n.d. Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower with Trees, 1910, oil on canvas, 126.4 x 92.8 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower with Trees, 1910, oil on canvas, 126.4 x 92.8 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. The Bibliothèque nationale sketch can also be seen as a diagram of the Red Eiffel Tower (1911–12, Fig. 5). That identification calls attention to the circular forms on the right-hand side of both the Red Eiffel Tower and Eiffel Tower with Trees, a motif that the sketch simply portrays as a double arc. Modelled, overlapping, and intersecting with the structure, the discs construct a sense of distance out of thin air. They do so by reducing the scale and multiplying the instances of the technique that we have been tracing in the Saint Séverin and Tower series. In these passages, the motif is freed from its reliance on both subject matter and viewer position and allowed to function as an independent system for representing space. Linking those curves to colour would require another line of experimentation. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Red Eiffel Tower, 1911–12, oil on canvas, 125 x 90.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Red Eiffel Tower, 1911–12, oil on canvas, 125 x 90.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Founding Collection. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. 3-D Colour Given his propensity for verbal imprecision, it is telling that Delaunay was remarkably clear about the theoretical origins of his style. The painter made repeated (and almost exclusive) references to Chevreul’s On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors in addition to appropriating the scientist’s key terms.19 (In fact, the majority of his 1913 paintings include ‘simultaneous contrast’ in the title.) Yet, scholars from Buckberrough and Spate to Hughes, Chipp, and Roque have side-lined Chevreul when they failed to see the link between Delaunay’s technique and the scientist’s claims.20 What they missed was On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast’s interest in spatial order. While Chevreul’s colour wheel (Fig. 6) makes a strong visual impression, it was neither the core of his theory, nor the central diagram displayed in the book. Instead, the intellectual nucleus of the ‘law’ was the colour hemisphere (Fig. 7), which included saturation and tone in addition to hue and was illustrated as a monochrome pop-up chart. Although it did not reproduce well, the idea that colour had to be understood in terms of the spatial relationships within a half globe full of gradations of hue, tone, and saturation was the basis of all Chevreul’s claims. He posited that the effects of optical comparison could be calculated by determining the distance between two colours on the hemisphere. The eye tends to focus on analogy when it views two neighbouring colours together. For example, if orange and red are placed side by side, they will look more alike than when they are separated. Contrast, on the other hand, occurs when the colours’ locations are far apart on the hemisphere. This heightens our experience of the distinctions in both hue and tone. Key examples of this are the increased purity and brightness seen in combinations of red and green or orange and blue. Chevreul’s hemisphere served to not only identify each colour, it also established relationships between them. In fact, the text includes failed attempts to establish a mathematical formula that would predict the effects of colour combinations. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Colour Wheel from M. E. Chevreul, On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors and the Combination of Colored Objects According to that Law in Painting, the Gobelins Tapestries, Beauvais Tapestries for Furniture, Carpets, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Cloth, Printing, Lighting, Interior Design, Clothing, and Horticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et ce., 1839). Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Colour Wheel from M. E. Chevreul, On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors and the Combination of Colored Objects According to that Law in Painting, the Gobelins Tapestries, Beauvais Tapestries for Furniture, Carpets, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Cloth, Printing, Lighting, Interior Design, Clothing, and Horticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et ce., 1839). Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide Colour Hemisphere from M. E. Chevreul, On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors and the Combination of Colored Objects According to that Law in Painting, the Gobelins Tapestries, Beauvais Tapestries for Furniture, Carpets, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Cloth, Printing, Lighting, Interior Design, Clothing, and Horticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et ce., 1839). Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide Colour Hemisphere from M. E. Chevreul, On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors and the Combination of Colored Objects According to that Law in Painting, the Gobelins Tapestries, Beauvais Tapestries for Furniture, Carpets, Mosaics, Stained Glass, Cloth, Printing, Lighting, Interior Design, Clothing, and Horticulture (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et ce., 1839). The colour hemisphere was a diagram, that is, both the abstract truth and the practical reality of colour. Its order also governed the way hue, tone, and saturation were affected by and influenced the experience of position and distance. When Chevreul turned his attention to the practice of painting, the scientist focused on the topic of modelling. Traditionally signified by shading in black, changes in tone convey both a sense that the object depicted is in the round and, since the light is placed at a distance from the object, that it is situated in an a priori space. Chevreul’s investigations were aimed at integrating hue into that normally black and white relationship. The outcomes of his experiments show that shifts in lighting, which are often equivalent to spatial differences, produce changes in hue that range from subtle tinting to the appearance of complementaries in deep shadows. For example, the scientist describes the changes in hue between a directly lit swatch and one in shadow, noting the following shifts: Original Color In Less Direct Light Red Deeper, more crimson, less yellow Orange Redder, less yellow Yellow Duller, more green Green Deeper, less yellow, more blue Blue Deeper, less green Violet Deeper, less red, more blue Original Color In Less Direct Light Red Deeper, more crimson, less yellow Orange Redder, less yellow Yellow Duller, more green Green Deeper, less yellow, more blue Blue Deeper, less green Violet Deeper, less red, more blue Original Color In Less Direct Light Red Deeper, more crimson, less yellow Orange Redder, less yellow Yellow Duller, more green Green Deeper, less yellow, more blue Blue Deeper, less green Violet Deeper, less red, more blue Original Color In Less Direct Light Red Deeper, more crimson, less yellow Orange Redder, less yellow Yellow Duller, more green Green Deeper, less yellow, more blue Blue Deeper, less green Violet Deeper, less red, more blue 21 He goes on to explain that these shifts occur in three-dimensional objects seen from a single point of view. In other words, they are an alternate way of understanding shadows. Not only do these demonstrations undermine the idea that hue is always local, they also show the limitations of using drawing as the sole means of depicting spatial relations. In sum, Chevreul contends that a uniformly coloured object will appear polychromatic in a real environment. Delaunay responded to Chevreul’s insights by using the scientist’s system as a means of representing space. Note, for example the intersection at the left edge of The Simultaneous Windows (Second Motif, First Part) (1912, Fig. 8) where orange, yellow, green, and purple meet. Chevreul explains that orange becomes redder and less yellow compared to the same colour in less light. Thus, the vertical line between deep orange and a more yellow region is a difference in the position of those two areas. It can be read as a fold in the plane or a corner. Similarly, the scientist notes that yellow appears less vibrant and greener; therefore, the horizontal shift is a change in direction and location. The juxtapositions between yellow and purple, orange and green are even more drastic adjustments in lighting and orientation since Chevreul asserts that the complementary of the colour exposed to full light will appear in nearby areas of shadow. The colour combinations help to identify the curtains framing the scene and the changes in hue are a product of folds in the fabric. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, The Simultaneous Windows (Second Motif, First Part), 1912, oil on canvas, 55.2 x 46.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift, 41.464. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, The Simultaneous Windows (Second Motif, First Part), 1912, oil on canvas, 55.2 x 46.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift, 41.464. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY. In addition to modelling objects, colour combination organises the composition as a whole. Delaunay typically chose a deep blue or green for the tower. This is a marked change from the red tones he tended to employ in other series, and the azure haziness of these towers should be understood as the product of aerial perspective. The most distant object in the scene, Eiffel’s work is most often depicted in and surrounded by cool tones. There is also a subtler regularity to the colouring of the Windows: the middle of the left and right edges of the canvases tend to be redder than the rest of the works. Often these areas are more purple or orange than true red, but they always move into the warm range and provide a contrast to the blue-green of the centre. Despite the consistency of these two aspects of the series, the intervening passages display a great deal of variety from canvas to canvas. Thus, the problem raised by the series seems to be how one could modulate between the two hues and unify a composition that moves from warm to cool and back again. Yet, that question is not fundamentally different from the issues of perspective in the Saint Séverin and Eiffel Tower. Delaunay not only used colour to mark the horizon and the points nearest the viewer, he also attempted to establish a regular and perhaps even proportional transition between them. While the exact colours change from canvas to canvas, in general the hue set by the tower is repeated down to the bottom edge of the work. Increasingly interspersed with lighter colours, the hue of the tower establishes a triangular form that is not unlike the perspectival grid laid out on a floor. The tower serves as both the apex of that triangle and its vanishing point. Surrounding that central area are more varied hues which almost always include a diagonal swath of yellow outlining the right-hand perimeter of the Tower’s triangle. The Simultaneous Windows (First Part, Second Motif, First Replica) (1912, Fig. 9) provides a particularly helpful example of this general phenomenon since the golden region has a thicker impasto than the rest of the work. This calls attention to the fact that there are two linear regimes in the series, though the Windows’ lines are always the contours of coloured areas: (1) a surface grid that parallels the sides of the canvas and (2) a series of diagonal lines that cut across the other grid but tend to be less precisely defined than the perpendicular intersections. Directly beneath the tower, in the area where its hue is most often repeated, there is an emphasis on vertical elements. This region is typically separated from the edifice itself by a firm horizontal line. While the right-angled grid continues throughout the canvas, outside the triangle created by the tower, it is dominated by the diagonals that are often the occasion for dramatic shifts in hue as well as looser brushwork. Paradoxically in terms of both Renaissance perspective and the Modernist grid, it is these oblique forms that call attention to the surface of the painting. It is easy to identify these diagonal-laden regions as curtains and their colours as indicative of the shadows of folds. However, what is essential about these works is that they show that space can be depicted through colour alone. While the resemblance to the tower and the curtains (as well as the buildings in front of Eiffel’s structure) is the starting point of these works, their execution and the necessity of modulating between the different distances show that Delaunay conceived of colour as a means of representing space. Fig. 9. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, The Simultaneous Windows (First Part, Second Motif, First Replica), 1912, oil on canvas and wood, 46 x 40 cm. bok Bildagentur/Elke Walford/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 9. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, The Simultaneous Windows (First Part, Second Motif, First Replica), 1912, oil on canvas and wood, 46 x 40 cm. bok Bildagentur/Elke Walford/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/Art Resource, NY. While all the elements described above can be found in an example like Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif) (1912, Fig. 10), they have become subservient to a more general table of colour relationships that spans the gap between distanced perspectives and modelling close at hand. This canvas moves from green and blue in the centre through yellow and orange to red and purple on the outer edges. Thus, the work includes the full circumference of the colour wheel and integrates a series of complementary pairings. These can be found at the right- and left-hand edges of the canvas. In passages like these, a spatial system of colour is rendered visible. The juxtaposition of purple and orange evokes distance both according to the structure of the composition and when translated onto Chevreul’s hemisphere. Fig. 10. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif) – Fenêtres ouvertes simultanément (1ère partie 3ème motif), 1912, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 37.5 cm. Acquisition Purchased 1967. © Tate, London/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 10. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif) – Fenêtres ouvertes simultanément (1ère partie 3ème motif), 1912, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 37.5 cm. Acquisition Purchased 1967. © Tate, London/Art Resource, NY. Orienteering Yet, Delaunay argued that he was doing something more than coming up with a new method for – depending on one’s assessment of the artist’s modernity – either imitating or signifying. To repeat some of his emphatic claims: ‘Simultaneity is a technique […] Simultaneous contrast is from the most profound point of view – reality – form – construction – representation – life’.22 This refusal to distinguish ‘reality’ and ‘form’, ‘representation’ and ‘life’ is not a poetic flourish but a forceful statement of his system’s connection to reality. ‘Construction’, a term Delaunay often used to evoke the idea that simultaneous contrast was the basis of the compositional order of his paintings, is positioned as equivalent to both art and life. Delaunay’s technical fascination with space was paralleled by a sustained interest in real places. The city of Paris was not only the topic of the closest thing he ever produced to a Salon machine, the City of Paris (1912), it was also the theme of much of his oeuvre. The Eiffel Tower, the Trocadéro, the Ile de la Cité, the Ferris wheel, Saint Séverin, Nôtre Dame, and the bridges of Paris not only appear in his work, they serve to link his formal innovations to the real world. His subjects carve out a series of paths through the city and connect his paintings to the locations he frequented. Given this intimate relationship between the spaces Delaunay inhabited and the locales he portrayed, it is somewhat shocking that one of his favourite places is missing. Around 1913 Delaunay could often be found at the intersection of the boulevard du Montparnasse and the avenue de l’Observatoire. This corner where the southern edge of the Luxembourg gardens juts into Montparnasse was the home of the Closerie des Lilas, a café that was the setting for many aesthetic discussions amongst the Parisian avant-garde, and the Bal Bullier, a dance hall where Delaunay tangoed at least once a week, usually on Thursdays. The lure of this intersection was so strong that the Delaunays even made the weekly trip in from their country residence during the summer months, and the area features prominently in Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s 1913 work. It was certainly one of Delaunay’s places, especially at this moment, and yet his production from the time was largely directed towards the ever so distant sun and moon. But in truth, they were not so far away. This intersection is also home to the Paris Observatory, the seat of French astronomical study, and the Park of Great Explorers with its fountain featuring female personifications of the four parts of the world topped by a gridded sphere. The sun, the moon, and a round globe are present on this corner, and this geographic discovery helps bring the Sun and Moon series, as well as Delaunay’s rhetoric, back down to earth. Delaunay had been struggling for years with spaces that could not be confined to the perspectival grid, and he had often turned to rounded forms in order to evoke changes in distance and position. In 1913, the moment when he was most often near this intersection, the painter made an abrupt shift away from the linear and chose to depict celestial orbs. By doing so he was acknowledging the rounded reality of the world, a space that seems to be flat but is actually curved. With this in mind, Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913, Fig. 11) offers an interesting view. The painting contains three sets of circles: the upper concentric rings, the lower mass of spiralling forms, and the shape of the canvas itself. The title suggests that the diagonal swath of blue at the centre of the painting is dividing night from day, allowing the viewer to experience the sun and the moon at the same time. Aside from brief glimpses at dawn or dusk, these forms are usually seen on opposite sides of the planet. Therefore, I would suggest that the final circle, that of the canvas itself, is the earth, and Delaunay is calling attention to the fact that it is a globe, or to put it in the artist’s own terms, ‘the world is round’. Fig. 11. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrast: Sun and Moon [Soleil, lune, simultané 2], Paris 1913 (dated on painting 1912), oil on canvas, 134.5 cm diameter. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. ©The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/ART Resource, NY. Fig. 11. View largeDownload slide Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrast: Sun and Moon [Soleil, lune, simultané 2], Paris 1913 (dated on painting 1912), oil on canvas, 134.5 cm diameter. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. ©The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/ART Resource, NY. The relationship between time, the movement of the sun, and a round planet was a political, scientific, and Parisian issue in 1913 as that was the year that Standard Time was put into effect.23 Before Standard Time was instituted, each town or city set its own time. Technological improvements in travel and communications made local time impractical, so in 1884 representatives from twenty-five countries convened for the Prime Meridian Conference. This assembly established Greenwich, England as the zero meridian and divided the globe into twenty-four time zones, each of which was one hour different from the zones surrounding it. Throughout the rest of the century, countries slowly adopted Standard Time. One further step remained, namely, to resolve how time would be determined. In 1912, the International Conference on Time was held in Paris. It decided that the Paris Observatory would take astronomical readings and broadcast the results from the Eiffel Tower to the rest of the world. The first of these broadcasts took place at ten in the morning on 1 July 1913. When Standard Time finally codified the relationship between time and global space, it was the culmination of centuries of scientific work, much of which originated from this area. Giovanni Domenico Cassini established and took up residence in the Paris Observatory in 1671. The astronomer was in the service of Louis XIV, who tasked him with the intertwined projects of mapping the Solar System and France. In many ways, Cassini continued the work of Galileo. He produced a detailed map of the surface of the moon. Significantly more refined than Galileo’s view of that celestial body, which Samuel Edgerton has suggested was indebted to the artistic technique of chiaroscuro, the chart not only includes the major craters, but also a small profile of a woman with flowing hair.24 Cassini also produced the first calculations of the dimensions of France thanks to his method of determining longitude. Longitude is a particularly vexing problem. Mapping a Cartesian grid onto a sphere has the unfortunate consequence of causing the lines to converge, thereby undermining its regularity and creating difficulties for calculating distance, position, and area. Defined as the angle of rotation around the axis formed by the poles, longitude has the benefit of preserving right-angle intersections between latitude and longitude even though lines of longitude converge at the poles. Yet, longitude has a far greater problem than the unequal distance between its divisions: there is no obvious place to begin counting. The poles and the halfway point between them, the Equator, provide convenient and easily agreed upon landmarks for dividing the world from North to South. The East–West division offers no such natural points, so a Prime Meridian or zero degree of longitude must be declared. For Cassini, this was a line running directly North to South through the Paris Observatory; while Standard Time selected the longitude of Greenwich. However, declaring a point of origin generates definitional problems: how does one rigorously define a position when there is no clear point of reference on the globe? The answer is by making reference to something not on the Earth, which is how longitude became reciprocally bound to the equally ambiguous concept of time. If noon is defined as the time when the sun is directly overhead at a particular location, then that location can be identified as the place where the sun is directly overhead at noon. This accounts for architectural phenomena like the window in the Paris Observatory that casts light directly onto tiles marking the Meridian. Rounding the grid in order to represent large or irregular spaces was, as we have seen, something Delaunay had been investigating in his own production. In the Saint Séverin, Eiffel Tower, City, and Windows series those were formal phenomena that arose from questions of how to represent various spaces. In late 1912, Delaunay seems to have become so convinced of his burgeoning system that he began applying it outside the confines of painting. Simultaneous contrast increasingly took on the status of an all-encompassing worldview for the artist in that he identified it in the real world. Standard Time, as well as the exploration and science that made it possible, provided key connections between representation and reality, and Delaunay explicitly connected his techniques to travel, time, the Eiffel Tower, and the real world in 1912, writing: The sense of hearing does not suffice for our understanding of the universe, because it doesn’t maintain duration. Its movement is successive; it demands a fatal parity and that’s a kind of mechanism where there’s no space and thus no rhythm or movement. Its law is the time of mechanical clocks that have no relation to the movement of the universe… Its limit is a practical order. Vehicles, trains are the image of the successive that closes parallels: the parity of rails… They are simulacra. The largest object on earth is subject to the same laws, it becomes a simulacrum. The Eiffel Tower, with its record height, the rails of length, etc.25 Bemoaning widespread reductions of ‘the universe’ to ‘simulacra’, Delaunay condemns most images in terms designed to highlight the superiority of his system. Succession is, according to the painter, fundamentally inaccurate. On a rhetorical level, this is obviously a way of privileging simultaneity and Chevreul. However, it also suggests that Delaunay had shifted the linear problems he had realised in painting onto the real world. The astronomical turn in Delaunay’s work shifts the status of his pictures. Whereas his earlier paintings treated particular locales as challenges to pictorial techniques, the Sun and Moon series presents colour theory as indistinguishable from the order of the world. The eleven paintings in the Sun and Moon series (1912–13), which portray the celestial bodies either individually or in tandem, were the impetus for the forms that increasingly characterised the rest of the painter’s work: overlapping curves of highly saturated colours. From the 1914 Homage to Blériot on, those shapes are often explicitly linked to technology. However, it was not only, as Spate contends, a spinning propeller that produced these circles.26 The coloured arcs also appear in, for instance, the 1916 Portuguese Woman, where they are connected to the domestic (the table), the natural (plants), and the traditional (the woman’s clothing). These rings provided Delaunay with a way of integrating seemingly antithetical subjects into a common perspective, and as the diverse nature of the objects depicted suggests, the style emerging from the Sun and Moon series was meant to be all encompassing. It was a full system of representation and a way of understanding the world. Circling the Square Written for Der Sturm in the summer of 1912, Delaunay’s most famous essay, ‘Light’, displays his expansive view of a colour system: If art is attached to the Object, it becomes descriptive, divisive, literary. It stoops to imperfect modes of expression, it condemns itself of its own free will, it is its own negation, it does not liberate itself from mimesis. If in the same way it represents the visual relationships of an object or between objects without light playing the role of governing the representation. It is conventional. It does not achieve plastic purity. It is a weakness. It is life’s negation and the negation of the sublimity of the art of painting. For art to attain the limits of sublimity, it must approach our harmonic vision: clarity. Clarity will be color, proportions, these proportions are composed of various simultaneous measures within an action. This action must be representative harmony, the synchromatic movement (simultaneity) of light, which is the only reality. The synchromatic action will thus be the Subject which is the representative harmony.27 The artist posits that painting must eschew the task of referencing objects through visual resemblance, yet remain tied to perception and the world by light and its relationship to space. It is clear from this passage that he wants an art increasingly divorced from recreating the contours of objects. He speaks of geometry removing ‘life or movement’ from things,28 and of that kind of drawing needing not only to be replaced, but superseded by the ‘represent[ation of] the visual relationships […] light playing the role of governing the representation’ (emphasis in original), or colour. Chevreul’s key terms (‘contrast’, ‘harmony’, ‘purity’, and ‘simultaneity’) appear throughout the essay, but the scientist’s arrangement of colour is its philosophical core. According to Delaunay, painting represents the world by recreating the visual relationships, or as he puts it, ‘color contrasts […] make up Reality’.29 Using Chevreul’s scientific studies, Delaunay developed a system of depicting space through colour. He soon made larger claims for that technique, suggesting that it was something like the natural order of the world. Obviously trading on his close theoretical connections to science, Delaunay positioned his technique as akin to a Grand Unified Theory. The absurdity of such assertions is clear. Nevertheless, they reveal how the artist offers an alternative to the aesthetic ideas circulating in and derived from this milieu. Despite later claims, Delaunay’s work is not an abstract meditation on the medium. Nor is it a spiritual endeavour or an attempt to translate music to painting. Though they share an investigation of the limits of linear perspective, Picasso and Braque’s semiotic deconstructions of representation are far from Delaunay’s concerns. The artist evaded the pervasive interest in the fourth dimension at this moment and similarly shied away from the philosophy of Henri Bergson. These disparate ideas are linked by wariness about the visual and its claims to truth. Thus, if, as the artist himself put it, ‘Delaunay was the only one to react against the whole period and was called the first heretic of Cubism’, it was because he developed a system we could see.30 Look: ‘the world is round, my dear fellow, the world is round’. Footnotes 1 Michel Seuphor, L'Art abstrait, ses origines, ses premiers maîtres (Paris: Maeght, 1950), p. 42, quoted and translated in Georgine Oeri, ‘Delaunay in Search of Himself,’ Arts, 33/6 (March 1959), p. 33 and Sherry A. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of Simultaneity (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 28. 2 Herschel B. Chipp, ‘Orphism and Color Theory’, The Art Bulletin, 40/1 (March 1958), p. 58. 3 Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay; Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 4 Gordon Hughes, ‘Coming into Sight: Seeing Robert Delaunay's Structure of Vision’, October, 102 (Autumn 2002), pp. 87–100; ‘Envisioning Abstraction: The Simultaneity of Robert Delaunay's First Disk’, The Art Bulletin, 89/2 (June 2007), pp. 306–32; and Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Pascal Rousseau, Robert Delaunay de l’impressionnisme à l’abstraction (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1999). 5 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Name of Picasso’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 6 In the Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Arthur Cohen, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 23. 7 The original book was published in Paris in 1839 by Pitois-Levrault. From there versions of the book proliferated with at least two popularisations of its diagrams published in France by 1850, a German edition produced in 1847 and an English translation in 1854. 8 Roque, Art et science de la couleur. 9 René Huyghe Delacroix (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), p. 343, and Barthélémy Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 52–54. 10 Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Roque, Art et science de la couleur. 11 Félix Fénéon, ‘Le Néo-I’pressionnisme’, in Œuvres plus que complètes, volume 2, Joan Halperin (ed.) (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1970), pp. 71–76; Paul Signac, De Eugène Delacroix à néo-impressionnisme (Paris: Hermann, 1964); Robert L. Herbert, Seurat: Drawings and Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004); William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964); John Rewald, ‘Seurat: The Meaning of the Dots’, in Studies in Post-Impressionism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), pp. 157–67; and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in West Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 12 Roque, Art et science de la couleur. 13 A series of letters about and drafts of this text are in the Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, p. 179. 14 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 12–14. 15 A series of 1903 photographs by Eugène Atget show that the flooring is largely unchanged. 16 Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, pp. 33–34. 17 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 12–14. 18 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 12–14. 19 I have encountered only one reference to Ogden Rood in Delaunay’s writings. 20 Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay; Spate, Orphism; Hughes, ‘Coming into Sight’, ‘Envisioning Abstraction’, and Resisting Abstraction; Chipp, ‘Orphism and Color Theory’; and Roque, Art et science de la couleur. 21 M. E. Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Arts, trans. Faber Birren (West Chester: Schiffer Publishing, 1987), p. 87. 22 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 179. 23 Stephen Kern (The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)) and Virginia Spate (Orphism) mention Standard Time in relation to Delaunay’s fascination with the Eiffel Tower, but neither connects it to his Sun and Moon series. 24 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., ‘Galileo, Florentine “Disegno”, and the “Strange Spottednesse” of the Moon’, Art Journal, 44/3 (Autumn 1984), pp. 225–32. 25 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. The translation is mine. 26 Spate, Orphism. 27 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 82–83. 28 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 82. 29 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 81. 30 Fonds Delaunay, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Published and translated in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 14. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘The World is Round’: Robert Delaunay and Representation
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcy014
DA - 2018-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-world-is-round-robert-delaunay-and-representation-Iy9fxSW0Op
SP - 197
EP - 218
VL - 41
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -