Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism 9780226159232

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Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism

Gordon Hughes University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Gordon Hughes is Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History at Rice University, editor of Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War One, and coeditor of October Files: Richard Serra. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in China 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15906-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15923-2 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226159232.001.0001 Publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hughes, Gordon, 1965– author. Resisting abstraction : Robert Delaunay and vision in the face of modernism / Gordon Hughes. pages

cm

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-15906-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-15923-2 (e-book) 1. Painting, French. 2. Delaunay, Robert, 1885–1941. I. Title. ND553.D357H84 2014 759.4—dc23 2013050779 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my mother, Diana Grace Hughes

Introduction

1

1

Break ( Windows)

9

2

Punch (Painting)

59

3

Movement (into Abstraction)

95

Conclusion

139

Acknowledgments

147

Notes

149

Index

167

0.1. Robert Delaunay, The First Disk, 1913. Oil on canvas, 134 cm diameter. Private collection.

Words are no match for Louise Lawler’s photographs when it comes to capturing the melancholy fate of Robert Delaunay’s achievement. Relegated to a corner, hard to see properly or stand in front of because of the television that blocks access, Delaunay’s 1913 First Disk (figure 0.1)—the most remarkable of his many remarkable paintings and a landmark in the history of twentieth-century art— seems all but forgotten in the cramped, trophy-filled New York City apartment of art collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine (figure 0.2). With stark poignancy, ­Lawler’s photographs of the Disk—two taken in 1984 in the Tremaines’ apartment and a third when the painting came up for auction six years later—picture the grim decay of so much that fueled Delaunay’s art. This decay is all the more apparent when compared with another photo of the Tremaines’ apartment. Taken by the photographer Adam Bartos, it appeared as a double-page spread in the April 1984 issue of House and Garden (figure 0.3). Unlike the scene in Lawler’s photograph, which, as the title makes explicit, was “arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine,” the living room in Bartos’s photograph is composed with an eye to the passing glance of House and Garden readers: the television and clutter around the Disk have been removed, the Roy Lichtenstein lamp is discreetly out of frame, and the central dark rectangle of the fireplace (visible in the lower right corner of Lawler’s pictures) artfully balances Delaunay’s circular form to the left with Mondrian’s lozenge to the right. The spruced-up apartment has a light and airy feel; in Lawler’s photos, the light from the window to the left of the painting seems inflected with the same bluish glow as the television. But the quality of light in both photographs—the harsh incandescent glare in Lawler’s, the glossy photo-spread sheen in Bartos’s—stands in stark opposition to the use of light that underpins Delaunay’s paintings and that inspired his 1912 essay “La lumière” (“Light”). “Without visual perception,” he writes, “there is no light, no movement,” as if speaking to a blindness that, though he could not have seen this threat ­coming, appears caught in the frozen flicker of the television screen.1 In 1984, Delaunay’s vision for painting—for painting vision—appears blinded by the virtual face of Stevie Wonder. After a time, the neglected corner of the collectors’ apartment in Lawler’s photographs begins to feel more and more like a neglected corner of history. Not that the importance of the Disk has ever been seriously called into question, but

[1]

0.2. Louise Lawler, (Stevie Wonder) Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City, 1984. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. 0.3. Adam Bartos, photograph of the Tremaine apartment, House and Garden, April 1984. Courtesy of Adam Bartos.

such obdurate abstraction at such an early date has never been easy to make sense of. “I was taken for a lunatic,” recalls Delaunay, with an uneasy mix of bitter­ness and pride.2 In fairness, though, he must have anticipated this bewilderment; there was little by way of precedent for abstraction in 1913, and certainly nothing of this order. But this mystification has continued more or less unabated in the hundred or so years since. Take Alfred Barr’s 1936 spiderweb chart of modern art (figure 0.4). In the double prongs of its tangled teleologies, only Orphism— Apollinaire’s misbegotten term and attempt to unite the disparate abstract

[2]

Introduction

­tendencies of Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia— goes exactly nowhere. That the diagrammatic arrow leading from cubism to Orphism ends in what Barr sees as the only cul-de-sac in twentieth-century art is all the more surprising given that the relation between cubism and abstract art was the ostensible motive for his flowchart. Important enough to warrant mapping, Orphism’s significance is nonetheless unclear within the logic of Barr’s schema. For importance, as conceived by Barr, is clearly determined by flow; from movement to movement, one into the next, twentieth-century modernism progresses smoothly and logically down into the twin funnels of “geometrical” and

Seuro!

1890

d. 1891

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM

Rousseau

1895

Paris

1900

1905

(ABSTRACTl

1910

EXPRESSIONISM 1911

Munich

1920

1925 0.4. Alfred H. Barr, cover of the exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art,

1930

.'

1936). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art. ­Licensed by SCALA /Art

1935

NON-GEOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART

­Resource, NY.

[3]

Introduction

“non-­geometrical” abstract art. Everything leads to something else. Everything, that is, but Orphism, which just sits there, an apparent clog in the pipes. Yet this is a clog that cannot be cleanly removed or ignored; the early abstraction of Delaunay in particular is too significant—too much of a radical first—to be left off the chart. Despite its lack of flow—despite the fact that it goes nowhere— Orphism is important. It’s just not clear why. Part of the problem, of course, is the lack of fit among the artists assembled under the Orphic umbrella. All had undergone their artistic formation within cubism, and all shared a tendency toward abstraction when they broke with cubism in 1912. Beyond that, they had little of substance in common. The divergent nature of those muscled into Orphism is apparent in the very fact that most of these artists did slide into various channels of modernist flow: arrows can be drawn from Duchamp and Picabia to Dada and surrealism and from Léger to the postwar machine aesthetic of purism. In part it is these disparate directions that prevent Orphism from flowing as it should. The real problem, however, is Delaunay. For though the art historical tracks of influence have long been laid for the majority of those who passed through Orphism, Delaunay and his Disk present twentieth-century modernism with a stubborn radicality that it doesn’t quite know what to do with. While others moved on, Delaunay was left, more ebb than flow, to clog things up. If Barr’s chart stands out as the first art historical account to find itself at a 0.5. Frank Stella, Sinjerli II,

loss when dealing with Delaunay’s abstraction, it wasn’t to be the last. More

1967. Polymer and fluorescent

recently Yve-Alain Bois has acknowledged the stature of Delaunay’s Disk while

polymer paint on canvas, 3 meters diameter. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. Brooks Barron. Photo: Nemo Warr. © 2014 Frank Stella /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

simultaneously proclaiming it “a fluke.”3 Thierry de Duve has similarly described the Disk as “a moment of surprise that was without epistemological consequences.”4 Most surprising, perhaps, is the near-total exclusion of Delaunay from Clement Greenberg’s writing. In one of his few references to Delaunay, Greenberg writes, “Abstract art itself may have been born amid the painterliness of Analytical Cubism, Léger, Delaunay, and Kandinsky.”5 Yet unlike the other progenitors on the list, Delaunay appears only once in Greenberg’s collected writings, for a total of two paragraphs, in a 1949 exhibition review. Describing Delaunay as “an enterprising painter whose influence is perhaps more important than his art, fine as it is,” Greenberg, like art history in general, ascribes an influence to Delaunay that is duly noted but never substantiated.6 Looking more at home in the second half of the twentieth century than the early part of the first, the Disk bears a striking and often remarked resemblance to, for example, Jasper John’s targets, Kenneth Noland’s circle paintings, or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases (figure 0.5). And yet, surprisingly, the Disk has not been particularly well served by its anachronistic look. Rather than reaping the rewards

[4]

Introduction

of being “ahead of its time”—that avant-garde virtue par excellence, one would have thought—the Disk, with its by-our-eyes contemporary appearance, instead fueled a long-held belief, now known to be erroneous, that Delaunay did not exhibit the Disk publically until 1922 at the Galerie Paul Guillaume. The implication being, of course, that once abstraction had entered the realm of respectability, Delaunay attempted to repackage a private studio experiment never intended for exhibition as a finished tableau. Hence Pierre Francastel’s remark in his introduction to the 1957 catalogue raisonné that “isolated, the Disk only constitutes an étude.”7 Far from keeping it under wraps, however, Delaunay displayed The First Disk with apparent eagerness, a month or so after it was painted, at the 1913 Herbstsalon in Berlin.8 Omitted from the catalog through a series of miscommunications with Herwarth Walden, the exhibition’s organizer, its exhibition was in turn omitted, until recently, from the historical record. F ­ ollowing the Herbstsalon, it is likely that Delaunay went on to include the Disk at the 1914 Mánes group exhibition in Prague.9 One need only look at August Macke’s Farbenkreis II (groß) (figure 0.6) to see the impression it made on those who saw it.10 The complexities of the Disk’s exhibition record aside, the single greatest obstacle to a sustained and substantive accounting of Delaunay’s postcubist painting has been its stubborn resistance to default narratives of early abstraction as spiritually motivated. Early progenitors of abstraction, the standard story goes, reject appearance not as a means of breaking with realism but as a means of penetrating deeper and deeper into an unseen reality that escapes vision as such. “Even Delaunay,” according to Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “speaks of ‘tearing the veil,’ ” which folds him into a model of abstraction that aims to unveil a mystical “beyond” otherwise cloaked by surface appearance.11 Delaunay, however, could hardly have been more explicit in his rejection of mysticism. “What I want to say isn’t the least bit mystical,” he wrote sternly to August Macke in 1912.12 Or again: “Clear, living, visual—not mystical,” as he later described his relation to the French tradition.13 Through and through, Delaunay is as materialist a painter as they come. When he states his aspiration to “déchirer le voile,” he is not, as I understand him, claiming to reveal some unseen metaphysics beyond the veil of visible appearance. It is not the “beyond” of appearance so much as the “beneath” that interests Delaunay: moving below the representational content of what we see into its underlying perceptual structure. This is the core argument of this book: that Delaunay’s painting, from the Window series to The First Disk, constitutes a concerted, theoretically informed effort to represent not the appearance of vision—not what we see—but the physiological and cognitive process by which vision comes into sight—the underlying conditions that allow us to see as we do. Much as modernist painting gradually sheds representational content for its underlying material structure, Delaunay gradually sheds the representational content of vision for its underlying optical structure. The trick, pulled off with such simple ingenuity it has gone otherwise unnoticed, is to have these two structures, painting and vision, overlap with as much homologous precision as possible. The material flatness of the picture plane thus coincides with the optical flatness of the retinal surface, as does the ambiguous left-to-right, top-to-­bottom

[5]

Introduction

0.6. August Macke, Playing Forms—Spielende Formen, 1914. Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany. Photo: Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY.

orientation of Disk vis-à-vis the inverted image as it appears in the eye. At the same time, the painting’s circular shape reflects the circularity of the optical cone (the circular radius of vision prior to peripheral distortion), while the “purity” of discrete optical data is reflected in the “purity” of Delaunay’s painted colors—­ colors that acquire sense not in relation to a transparent referential function but in relation to one another. More than just the material structure of painting, however, it is the structure ­ ighteenthof the tableau—in the distinct sense of the term developed initially in e century France, before its reconception in the 1860s—that is ultimately at stake for Delaunay. In this sense, Delaunay’s painting looks back as much as it looks forward. Of course, no art historian has examined the central importance of the tableau within modernist painting more exhaustively, more convincingly, than Michael Fried, and I should acknowledge my debt to his work up front. Fried’s analysis of the tableau’s two distinct orders and speeds of viewing—the initial visual impact (“strikingness,” Fried calls it) and a significantly slower form of seeing that sustains the viewer’s contemplative engagement—are especially important to my claims regarding Delaunay’s work. In addition, Delaunay’s paintings stage the viewer’s double position in relation to the tableau, as he or she both stands apart from and is visually immersed in the painting. This double positioning of the viewer, as directly facing the painting from a certain distance and as “inhabiting” pictorial space, is allegorized by Delaunay in various ways: through the visual conventions associated with the frame and the camera obscura, for example, and through aerial and street vision (examined in chapters 1 and 2, respectively). For Delaunay, salvaging vision in the face of modernism—in the face of what Martin Jay has influentially described as the twentieth century’s “denigration of vision”—requires moving all of these underlying structures—vision, painting, tableau—into the open, such that each aligns with its structural counterpart. It is safe to say that one reason Delaunay’s Disk has proven so elusive to art historians is its obdurate singularity—a singularity foregrounded by the fact that the paintings leading up to it are neatly bundled into discrete series. By any ­standard, but especially against the backdrop of this preceding work, the Disk appears a one-off that, as de Duve describes it, “bursts out violently as something without real precedent in Delaunay’s work.”14 It is this view of the Disk as an isolated “fluke,” “without epistemological consequences,” an étude cut off from the rest of Delaunay’s postcubist painting, that this book seeks to correct. Over the course of the chapters that follow, I trace the pictorial reasoning that runs more or less unabated from Delaunay’s cubism through to The First Disk. The three chapters correspond to the three primary groups of work painted during this period: the Window series (chapter 1), the Cardiff Team series (chapter 2), and the Circular Forms series and First Disk (chapter 3). These groups of works in turn correspond to the three primary means by which Delaunay attempts to redeem vision for painting through contemporary developments in optical theory: visual acquisition, chromatic primacy, and somatic movement. Rejecting the wholesale denigration of vision that was everywhere around him, Delaunay represents a final, last-ditch effort to ground a structural foundation for painting in vision. Coming

[7]

Introduction

out the other side of cubism, he realized it was not enough to simply reflect a new “conceptual” understanding of vision for painting by refiguring its representation of the world. Appearances, cubist or otherwise, were no longer sufficient. Delaunay understood the nature of the problem like no other, and the solution for him was to represent not the content or appearance of vision—not what we see, or the way it looks—but vision itself, at the structural level. And in this way, appearances to the contrary, Delaunay resisted abstraction.

[8]

Introduction

e :

(

.

..)

1.1. Robert Delaunay, Portrait

1.2. Robert Delaunay, Land-

of Henry Carlier, 1906. Oil on

scape with Sun (verso of

canvas, 64 cm x 60 cm. Musée

self-portrait), 1905–1906. Oil

National d’Art Moderne,

on canvas, 54 cm x 46 cm.

­Centre Georges Pompidou,

Musée National d’Art Moderne,

Paris (AM2592P). Photo: Jean-

Centre Georges Pompidou,

Claude Planchet. CNAC /

Paris (AM4074Precto). Photo:

MNAM / Dist. Réunion des

Jacqueline Hyde. CNAC /

Musées Nationaux /Art

MNAM / Dist. Réunion des

­Resource, NY.

Musées Nationaux /Art ­Resource, NY.

1.3. Robert Delaunay, Saint Séverin No. 1, 1909. Private collection. Photo: Gianni Dagli Orti. Art Archive /Art Resource, NY.

Delaunay contra Cubism The year 1912 was a watershed for Robert Delaunay. On March 13 his first major exhibition in Paris closed to favorable reviews after two weeks at the Galerie Barbazanges.1 Comprising forty-six works, the exhibition spanned his career to date, featuring his early, self-taught impressionist works (figure 1.1), his 1905– 1906 neoimpressionist period (figure 1.2), a single painting from his 1909–1910 Saint-Sévrin series (Saint-Sévrin No. 1) (figure 1.3), a large number of Parisian cityscapes produced between 1909 and 1911 (figure 1.4), and the series of cubist

1.4. Robert Delaunay, La Ville No. 2, 1910. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (AM2766P). Photo: Philippe Migeat. CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand ­Palais /Art Resource, NY.

[ 11 ]

Eiffel Tower paintings from 1909–1911 (figure 1.5). The poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who was to live briefly with Delaunay and his wife, Sonia, from November to mid-December of 1912, praised these works in his review of the exhibition, trumpeting Delaunay as “an artist who has a monumental vision of the world. . . . Robert Delaunay has already come to occupy an important place among the artists of his generation.”2 Two weeks later, Apollinaire singled out La ville de Paris (figure 1.6) in his review of the Salon des Indépendants. “Decidedly, the picture by Robert Delaunay is the most important of this salon,” he effused. “La ville de Paris is more than an artistic manifestation. . . . He sums up, without any pomp, the entire effort of modern painting.”3 The critic Roger Allard agreed, deeming the “colored symphony” of La ville de Paris “the most remarkable” contribution on display.4

1.5. Robert Delaunay, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower, 1911/ 1923. Oil on canvas, 160.7 x 128.6 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection (1959.1). Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago.

[ 12 ]

chapter One

1.6. Robert Delaunay, The City of Paris (Ville de Paris), 1910– 1912. Oil on canvas, 267 x 406 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (AM2493P). Photo: Jean-Claude Planchet. CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion

Flagged by Apollinaire and other influential critics as a new force on the ­Parisian artistic landscape, Delaunay was also making steady strides elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Germany. He participated in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich (figures 1.7–1.9), where he sold four of the five works on view, including the first La ville, now lost, to the painter Alexei von Jawlensky.5 More important than sales, however, was the enthusiasm for Delaunay’s painting that abounded among members of the Blaue Reiter, leading to active correspondence

des Musées Nationaux /Art

between Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Franz Marc.6

Resource, NY.

Delaunay’s Blaue Reiter connections also resulted in Erwin Ritter von Busse’s article “Robert Delaunay’s Methods of Composition,” which appeared in the 1912 Blaue Reiter Almanac, alongside Roger Allard’s essay “The Signs of Renewal in Painting,” which praised Delaunay as a painter “who has conquered the arabesques of the picture plane and who shows the rhythm of great, indefinite depths.”7 Delaunay went on to exhibit that February in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich and in the Valet de carreau exhibition in Moscow. At Kandinsky’s urging he also participated in the inaugural Der Sturm exhibition in Berlin, which opened March 12, 1913,8 and through Hans Arp, at the Moderner Bund zweite Ausstellung in Zurich that July. As Delaunay’s reputation spread, Paul Klee was among the many painters outside of France to feel his influence. Klee visited

[ 13 ]

Break (Windows)

1.7. Robert Delaunay, SaintSéverin (left of the doorway), in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, room 2, December 19, 1911–January 1, 1912. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner Stiftung. 1.8. Robert Delaunay, The ­Eiffel Tower (middle), in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, room 3, December 19, 1911– January 1, 1912. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner Stiftung. 1.9. Robert Delaunay, The City (No. 1) (left) in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, room 1, ­December 19, 1911–January 1, 1912. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner Stiftung.

him at his Paris studio in 1912, and his German translation of Delaunay’s 1912 essay “La lumière” (“Light”) appeared in the January 1913 issue of Der Sturm as “Über das licht.”9 By the beginning of 1913 Delaunay was firmly ensconced within the upper ranks of the international avant-garde. In January he and Apollinaire traveled to Berlin to participate in the twelfth Der Sturm exhibition, Ständige Ausstellungen der Zeitschrift der Sturm, zwölfte Ausstellung, which ran from January 27 to February 20. Alongside works by Ardengo Soffici and Julie Baum, Delaunay exhibited twenty-one works in total (nineteen listed in the catalog plus two late additions), offering the first glimpse of his postcubist production to a German audience, including a dozen or so of the Window series and a sketch for the first The Cardiff Team. Nine days before the official opening, Apollinaire gave a lecture titled “Die neue Malerei” (“Modern Painting”), in which he championed Delaunay and Picasso as representing the two “most important” new tendencies in modernist painting.10 A month later, Herwarth Walden published Apollinaire’s lecture in the same issue of Der Sturm as Paul Bommersheim’s “Der Uberwindung der ­Perspektive und Robert Delaunay” (“The Overcoming of Perspective and Robert Delaunay”).11 Walden also helped Delaunay publish a catalog of the complete Window series, prefaced by Apollinaire’s poem “Les fenêtres.”12

[ 15 ]

Break (Windows)

Despite his burgeoning reputation in Europe, the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show in New York rejected Delaunay’s La ville de Paris, claiming the painting’s imposing size (an impressive 267 by 406 centimeters) would overwhelm the other works in the exhibition. Incensed, Delaunay tried unsuccessfully to remove his other contributions in protest.13 The organizers of Budapest, müvészház: Nemzetközi postimpresszionista kiallitas, a postimpressionist exhibition in Budapest arranged in collaboration with Walden, had no such qualms, exhibiting the canvas later that March along with eighteen other paintings by Delaunay. From Budapest it was on to Florence, where, from the end of May to the end of June, he exhibited three paintings in at the Società delle belle arti. In August 1913 he participated in another major exhibition of modernist work at the gallery Hans Goltz in Munich, the same month that his drawing Eiffel Tower was featured on the cover of Der Sturm. For all of Delaunay’s mounting influence and tireless exhibiting in the years 1912–1913, his legacy would have amounted to little more than an art-­ historical footnote were it not for his great breakthrough, his 1912 Window series (figures 1.10–1.25). Begun in La Madeleine in the Chevreuse Valley, where the Delaunays were vacationing for the summer, the twenty-two-painting series marks the moment of Delaunay’s artistic maturity following his break with cubism. The Windows, he writes, “truly began my life as an artist.”14 It was this series of remarkable paintings—unabashed, flaunting even, in their use of color— that ended Delaunay’s otherwise relatively unremarkable apprenticeship within ­cubism. Evidence to all who saw them that Delaunay had broken ranks, the ­Window series quickly established his reputation as “l’hérésiarque du ­cubisme”— “the heretic of Cubism.”15 To reference Delaunay’s self-proclaimed heresy or to characterize him as “breaking ranks” is not, I should make clear, to ascribe an overall aesthetic or conceptual coherence to the cubism that Delaunay came to oppose. As most scholars now recognize, the cubism of Picasso and Braque is wholly distinct from the so-called Salon cubism of Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, André Lhote, and others. Differences likewise abound within the critical reception of cubism. Yet despite the many internal tensions and contradictions in the characterization of cubism, both Delaunay and others understood his break in opposition to a very specific group of cubist painters. For despite their various formal and intellectual differences, the Salon cubists strategically represented themselves as a more or less cohesive movement, downplaying disparity in favor of a unifying common ground. Indeed, prior to his break with cubism, Delaunay ­himself played a central role in the decision that he, Gleizes, Metzinger, and Le ­Fauconnier made to display their work as a group, in what would come to be the first public, collective manifestation of cubism, salle 41 at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (hence “Salon cubism”). As Gleizes notes in his memoirs, it was important for these cubists painters to present a united front: “Metzinger, Le ­Fauconnier, Delaunay, and I decided to send work to the next Salon des Indépendants.  .  .  . But we must be grouped, that was the opinion of all.”16 Salon cubist

[ 16 ]

chapter One

1.10. Robert Delaunay,

1.11. Robert Delaunay, Simulta-

­Windows onto the City (1st

neous Windows, 1912. Oil on

part, 2nd Motif), 1912. Oil

canvas, 30 x 23.5 cm. Staats-

on cardboard, 39 x 29.6 cm.

galerie, Stuttgart.

­Location unknown. 1.12. Robert Delaunay, ­Windows, 1912–1913. Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 52.5 cm. Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf. Photo: Walter Klein, Düsseldorf.

1.13. Robert Delaunay, Windows, 1912. Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm. Private collection.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes similarly recalls how Gleizes and Jean Metzinger aimed “to establish a kind of legislation of the cubist movement.”17 The first published suggestion that Delauany had broken with the Salon cubists appeared in the March 23, 1912, issue of L’assiette au beurre, in James Burkley’s review of that year’s Salon des Indépendants. Commenting on entry number 868, Delaunay’s La ville de Paris, Burkley wrote that “Delaunay, commonly labeled a Cubist, has wished to isolate himself and declare that he has nothing in common with Metzinger or Le Fauconnier.”18 The most influential and enduring statement of rupture, however, took place in the context of the Section d’or exhibition at the Galerie la Boétie gallery on October 11, 1912 (the very day, coincidentally, that Klee visited Delaunay’s studio). It was here that Apollinaire gave his famous talk “Le cubisme écartelé” (“The Quartering of Cubism”), in which he described four recent and divergent tendencies in cubism: “scientific cubism,” “physical

[ 18 ]

chapter One

1.14. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (Les fenêtres simultanées [2e motif, 1re partie]), 1912. Oil on canvas, 55.2 x 46.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim ­Museum, New York. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding ­Collection, by gift (41.464).

1.15. Robert Delaunay, Les fenêtres sur la ville no. 3 (2ème motif, 1ère partie), 1912. Oil on canvas, 79 x 64.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Dr. Emil und Clara Friedrich-Jezler bequest, 1973. © Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zürich, Lutz Hartmann.

1.16. Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously, 1912. Tate Gallery, London. Tate, London /Art Resource, NY.

1.17. Robert Delaunay, Windows (Les fenêtres), 1912. Encaustic on canvas, 80 x 70 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY.

1.18. Robert Delaunay, Window onto the City, 1914. Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner Stiftung. Permanent loan to Stätische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

1.19. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows, 1912. Oil on canvas, 91 x 85 cm. Morton G. Neumann Family Collection. On loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

1.20. Robert Delaunay, Windows, 1912. Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 45.8 x 37.5 cm. Musée de Grenoble.

1.21. Robert Delaunay, Windows

1.22. Robert Delaunay, Three-

1.23. Robert Delaunay, Win-

1.24. Robert Delaunay, A Window

onto the City (1st Part, 1st

Part Windows, 1912. Oil on

dows (Simultaneous Open

(study for Three Windows), 1912–

­Simultaneous Contrasts), 1912.

canvas, 35.2 x 91.8 cm. Phila-

­Windows 1st Part, 3rd Motif),

1913. Oil on canvas, 111 x 90 cm.

Oil on canvas, 53.4 x 207.5 cm.

delphia Museum of Art, A. E.

1912. Oil on canvas, 57 x 123

Musée National d’Art Moderne,

Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Gallatin Collection, 1952. The

cm. Peggy Guggenhaim Col-

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Philadelphia Museum of Art /

lection, Venice.

(AM2975P). CNAC / MNAM /

Art Resource, NY.

Dist. Réunion des Musées ­Nationaux /Art Resource, NY.

1.25. Robert Delaunay, (1885– 1941). The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel. 1912. Oil on canvas, 130 x 196 cm. ­Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. ­William A. M. Burden. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. 1.26. Le Rire, April 5, 1913. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

cubism,” “Orphic cubism,” and “intuitive cubism.” Of these, only Orphic cubism would not lapse into almost immediate obscurity. Indeed, “Orphic cubism” quickly transformed into “Orphism,” the -ism proclaiming its status as a full and independent movement. In his talk, woven a year later into the fabric of The Cubist Painters, Apollinaire argued that Orphic cubism, roughly characterized by a tendency toward abstraction, represents a “pure art” consisting of “elements not borrowed from visual reality.” Orphic cubism, Apollinaire argued with typical poetic flare, appeared in the light—and only the light—of Picasso’s painting but was most clearly represented in the work of Delaunay, “with Fernand Léger, ­Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp also making great strides.”19 By early 1913 “Orphisme,” touted as the latest artistic nouveauté in the popular and critical press, began to appear as synonymous either with Delaunay or, at the very least, with the clear understanding of his leadership. But signs of fatigue and skepticism soon began to appear.20 The critic Max Goth, for example, considered the movement little more than ill-conceived, frustratingly vague hype. “Orphism,” he writes wearily, italicizing the word for effect, “and now we speak of Orphism. Or rather, we do not speak of it. All that we’ve tried to say has only clouded the question.”21 The same day Goth’s article appeared, two separate caricatures of Orphism also showed up in the popular press—one in Le rire L'ECOLE

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­(figure 1.26), the other in Le journal amusant (figure

chapter One

N' 719

JOURNAL

1.27). Demonstrating just how far Orphism had trickled

AMUSANT:

L' ECOLE " ORPHIQUE "

(DERNIERE

NOUVEAUTE)

into the public imagination, both caricatures lampoon paintings sufficiently recognizable as “Orphic” to a general reader. Delaunay himself first publicly distanced his work from cubism in an open letter to Gil Blas on October 28, 1912. Responding to Olivier-Hourcade’s claim, published in Paris-Journal eight days earlier, that “four ­ leizes, Le Fauconnier, and painters [Metzinger, G Léger] who, with Delaunay . . . created—and truly are—­ cubism,”22 Delaunay retorted: “I don’t support the ­opinion, inaccurately put forward by Mr. Hourcade, that proclaims me the creator of cubism with four ­colleagues and friends. . . . Only some friends, artists, and critics know the direction that my art has taken. . . . It is necessary to set the record straight.”23 In this very public disavowal of cubism—a disavowal that had already been picked up on by critics—what was it exactly that Delaunay was disassociating himself from? In part, Delaunay’s break with cubism marked a refusal to have his increasingly evident individualism suppressed through Salon cubism’s aspirations to unity. More to the point, however, it was the conceptual

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means by which the Salon cubists sought to establish this unity that Delaunay rejected. For cubism, in the

1.27. Le Journal Amusant, April

majority of its myriad forms, revolved around a central unifying premise: that

5, 1913. Bibliothèque nationale

vision, conventionally understood, could no longer serve as a viable basis for picto-

de France.

rial realism. For the Salon cubists, visual sensation was wholly unreliable and riven with all manner of false information. The mind, however, knows better: “The painter, when he has to draw a round cup, knows very well that the opening of the cup is a circle,” Olivier-Hourcade writes in defense of cubism. “When he draws an ellipse, therefore, he is making a concession to the lies of optics and perspective, he is telling a deliberate lie. Gleizes, on the contrary will try to show things in their sensible truth.”24 In place of an outmoded realism of vision (how we see an object), cubism, for critics such as Olivier-Hourcade—and there were many—­proposed a new realism of conception (how we know an object). It was through this realism of conception that cubism defended its paradoxical claim that despite the fact that the painted object bore little or no visual resemblance to its original source (indeed because the painting didn’t look like what it represented), it actually bore a greater resemblance to its subject than mere visual appearance was able to convey. By replacing visual with conceptual realism, cubism sought to lay bare the ontological ground of its subject matter, believing that it could peel away the visual skin of the object to expose its core truth. Such conceptual idealism proved seductive to the cubists not only in that it allowed modern painting to maintain its representative function while relinquishing a superannuated model of classical vision but also in

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Break (Windows)

that it held out the grandiose promise of an absolute realism, immune to the blights and vagaries of vision. While Salon cubism and its advocates turned to conception as the basis for a new realism—what Gleizes and Metzinger termed the “profound realism” of the mind, in opposition to the “superficial realism” of the eye, in their 1912 book Du cubisme—Delaunay alone attempted to develop a radically reconceived model of vision for painting.25 Well aware of recent developments in visual science and its consequences for painting (“Historically,” he writes, “there really was a change in understanding in modes of seeing, and thus in pictorial technique”), Delaunay enacts this “change in understanding,” beginning with the Windows series.26 Combining cubism’s emphasis on conception with impressionism’s emphasis on sensation, Delaunay’s Windows reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, cubism and impressionism, while remaining utterly distinct from each. More radical still, the Window series stages a central claim within modern optical science: that vision, far from being fully formed at birth, develops over time through a gradual process of acquisition. Looking at the Window series, we learn, much as we did once before, how to see.

Windows Take Simultaneous Windows onto the City (1st Part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica) (figure 1.28), the only work in the series to have a painted frame. At first sight, we see a loosely articulated grid of abstract colors—no clear figure-ground distinction, no evident orientation—within a two-dimensional array of rough, ill-defined ­chromatic shapes, each bleeding into the other. Over time, however, our vision develops. Looking carefully, we come to see the green, elongated triangle in the center of the canvas as the Eiffel Tower, with its lighter, more obscure supporting columns below. The two small dark-green dashes in the lower part of the painted frame take form as windows on a rectangular building front. Most surprisingly, and with some effort, we come to see a face—our face? the artist’s face?—caught in the reflection of the window (figure 1.29). Inconsistent with the other shapes in the painting, the dark-green-on-yellow partial oval shape two-thirds of the way down the right side of the painting suddenly slides into view as a mouth, while the quarter circle beneath it becomes a chin. The jaw and then the neck extend the sloping, fragmented line of the tower just above the corner of the canvas. The inverted teardrop ear lies nestled between the dark-green right side of the tower and the yellow left side of the face. When we finally notice the conspicuous rectangular form that cuts diagonally from lower left to upper right across the surface of almost all of the paintings in the series, it also asks that we concentrate our vision, that we in one way or another try to make sense of it. Is this another image, mirrored like the face in the reflective surface of the window? Or is this a part of the cityscape outside, something we see as we look through the window? Or is this altogether too literal a view? Perhaps this odd shape has more to do with Delaunay’s engagement with

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chapter One

1.28. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows onto the City (1st part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica), 1912. Oil on canvas and wood, 46 x 40 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

“pure painting” and the formal aspects of composition and color than the literal properties of transparency and reflection? Learning to make sense of the view from this particular window, we combine conceptual knowledge with sensory information: what we know with what we see. Once we know the title—once we know that this is a window—and once we recall Delaunay’s prior paintings of the Eiffel Tower and cityscapes, it makes sense that the orthogonal grid would transform into a view of Paris. We also know from experience that transparency can flip into reflection and that, as we look through the window, we may unexpectedly catch a glimpse of ourselves, abstracted in the refracting light, caught in the act of seeing. Delaunay reflects the act of seeing back to us. But more than just reflecting an image of vision—more than just reflecting the image of a face that each successive viewer can learn to see as his or her own—Delaunay reflects the actual structure of seeing. If Delaunay slows down our gaze after its initial first impression, as I want to argue, in order that we may learn to see not only images but the process of vision itself, this is not at all how he has been understood within art history. Quite the contrary, in fact, as we can see in the repeated claims for Delaunay’s Windows as a form of “retinalism.” A term of disparagement used by cubists, retinalism references the impressionist attempt to capture the pace of modern life as it darts across the surface of the eye. Retinalism, then, is a model of vision premised on speed and fleeting appearance—a pictorial blink of an eye that pulls a frozen instant from the continuous stream of optical sensation. Pascal Rousseau, for instance, views the Windows as, “entirely motivated by the avid retinalism of the ‘painting of modern life’: ‘Looking to see,’ to see more and more quickly, to see too much, sometimes to the point of risking a hypnotic vertigo as the eye is carried away by the gyrating movement of colors.”27 Rosalind Krauss sees things much the same way: “the ‘arrêt à la rétine,’ the stopping of the analytic process at the retina .  .  . This is the logic we hear, for example, in Delaunay’s assertions that the laws of simultaneous contrast within the eye and the laws of painting are one and the same.”28

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chapter One

1.29. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows onto the City (1st part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica), 1912 (detail). Oil on canvas and wood, 46 x 40 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

As is well known, Delaunay does indeed align his painting with simultaneous contrast, a form of retinal optical mixing first described and theorized by the ­nineteenth-century French polymath Michel-Eugéne Chevreul (figure 1.30).29 But far from exemplifying a form of naïve retinalism, Delaunay’s engagement with simultaneous contrast stands as the most obvious evidence of his involvement with developments in optical science. It is true that Chevreul’s theory c ­ oncerns the effects of colored light upon the retina, but to construe this as a commitment

1.30. Félix Nadar (Gaspard

to “retinalism” on Delaunay’s part is to miss entirely what was c ­ rucial not only to

Félix Tournachon), “The

Delaunay but to optical science in this period. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth

French chemist Michel ­Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), the day of his centenary.” Two of ­twenty-seven photo-

­century, the overriding concern of optical science was the problem of how we see beyond the surface of the retina. For, as modern theories of vision became increasingly aware, there exists a fundamental difference between the image

graphs taken by Nadar,

formed on the retina and the image we perceive. It was this realization—that

August 31, 1886. Adoc-­

­optical sensation is distinct from actual visual perception—that formed the essen-

photos /Art ­Resource, NY.

tial divide between modern and premodern (or “classical”) theories of vision.30 Thus, not only is the physiology of vision structured according to binocularity, by the absence of clearly defined figure-ground distinctions, and by the upsidedown, left-to-right inversion of the external image on the retina, but it is also ­completely two-dimensional.

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