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    Robert Delaunay
    Robert Delaunay
    Robert Delaunay
    Ebook158 pages48 minutes

    Robert Delaunay

    By Vicky Carl

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The French painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) revolutionised the use of colour in art. Influenced by the French master Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), close friends with the French poet Apollinaire (1880-1918) and admired by the German painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), he founded the Orphism art movement together with his wife Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) in the early 1910s. Geometric shapes and bright colours marked his way to a unique form of Abstractionism that earned him a place among the greatest artistic minds of the first half of the 20th century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateDec 9, 2019
    ISBN9781644618035
    Robert Delaunay

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      Book preview

      Robert Delaunay - Vicky Carl

      Index

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1913, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire dedicated his work The Cubist Painters to Cubism, thereby helping the movement attain broad renown. Painters like Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes made impressive contributions to the Cubist language of shapes. In 1912 one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century was created: The Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp. Aided by the Cubist vocabulary of shapes and his familiarity with Étienne-Jules Marey’s photos depicting movement, Duchamp painted a picture that moved the world. Five movements of the motions of one person, descending a spiral staircase, are captured in time-lapsed sequence, showing all the reciprocal movements triggered by her walking. Simultaneity is the lyric expression of the modern view of life; it signifies the rapidity and the concurrence of all existence and action. In doing this, Duchamp introduced time as the fourth dimension in the painting. Though this nude triggered a scandal at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, some recognised the innovative character of this new work, calling it the light at the end of the tunnel. Duchamp, brother of the painter Jacques Villon, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon and the painter Suzanne Duchamp, was anything but a consistent worker. His unruly soul quickly led him to experiment with different media and eclectic ideas that shocked the art world. In New York, he became friends with Francis Picabia, with whom he became responsible for Dadaism.

      Simultaneity signifies the rapidity and the concurrence of all existence and action. Simultaneity for the Futurists was the "lyrical exultation [and] the artistic visualisation of velocity. It is the result of those great causes of universal dynamism." It was also the focus of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. However, they both interpreted the term in a completely different manner. When Guillaume Apollinaire credited both the Delaunays with the term, the Futurist Boccioni accused them of plagiarism because he was not prepared to cede this key term to others, much less to two whose interpretation veered so greatly from his own.

      The Delaunays did not, like other artists, use this term to mean dynamism. They did not refer to the élan vital (vital force) as Bergson did, but rather to Chevreul’s theory of the law of simultaneous contrast. This theory, which dated from 1839 and had already played a role with the Impressionists, related colours and the relationship of objects to one another. Chevreul’s work was republished in 1890 and thus more present in the collective knowledge of artists. Sonia Delaunay, in her work Contrastes Simultanés (Simultaneous Contrasts) dared to jump directly into the abstract. Her painting was already a formal reference system of colour rhythms at a time when her husband Robert and artists Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Picasso were still slowly making their way towards detaching themselves from objects.

      Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968, Dada, French, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, Oil on canvas, 146.8 x 89.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

      Wassily Kandinsky, Romantic Landscape, 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.3 x 129 cm. Lenbachhaus, Munich.

      Paul Klee, View of a Harbour at Night, 1917. Gouache and oil on paper coated with chalk and glue, 21 x 15.5 cm. Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg.

      Robert Delaunay founded Orphism, also known as Orphic Cubism. Because of the orchestration of colour, Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom Delaunay was closely allied in 1912, named Delaunay’s painting style after Orpheus, the musician of Greek mythology. The origins of his painting style derived from Impressionism, Analytical Cubism and from Cézanne. The new landmark of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, built in 1898, fascinated him. Its elegant design became the subject of the Windows series. He painted it repeatedly, in new variations and refractions, using light and bright colour harmonies based on the colour values of light separated by a prism. He painted the dizzying views of the tower, the delicate construction, the fantastic view that he looked upon and yet always saw with a new perspective.

      Guillaume Apollinaire observed: "That which differentiates Cubism from the old schools of painting is that it is not an art of painting, but an art of conception which tends to rise to that of creation. In representing the concept of reality, or the created reality, the painter can give the appearance of three dimensions, he can, so to speak, cube it. He cannot do this by rendering simply the reality as seen unless he makes use of an illusion either in perspective or foreshortening which deforms the quality of the form conceived or created.

      In Cubism, four tendencies have manifested themselves, of which two are parallel and pure. Scientific Cubism is one of the pure tendencies. It is the art of painting new ensembles with elements borrowed, not from the reality of vision, but from the reality of consciousness. Every man has the perception of this inner reality. It is not necessary, for example, to be a man of culture to conceive of a round form. The geometrical aspect which so vividly impressed those who saw the first scientific canvases came from the fact that the essential reality was given with great purity and that the visual accidents and anecdotes had been eliminated". He concluded: "I love the art of today because above all else I love the light and all men love light—above all else Man

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