ABSTRACT ART HISTORY Page: 9
ROBERT DELAUNAY
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Between Mondrian's strict economy and Kandinsky's ebullience there was room for some restraining, conciliatory element. This place was filled by Robert Delaunay for a short time, just long enough for him to leave a few works of incomparable beauty, by which I mean his Windows of 1912.
We are constantly reminded of that exceptional year, 1912. 1912 is increasingly recognized as the peak year of this century's painting, a year of transition in which everything was begun afresh although the old disciplines were neither consciously nor finally cast aside; a year from which the main tendencies of abstract art have radiated and to which we can always turn in our search for origins, for the seed of invention. One of the most valuable and fertile of these was the gay, fresh painting of Delaunay, who named his canvases after an expression of Eugène Chevreul, Simultaneous Contrasts.
Delaunay was born in Paris, in the rue de Chaillot, not far from the present Musée d'Art Moderne. He was the jovial type of Frenchman, or rather a typical Parisian, with a ready tongue and those quick blue eyes which seem to dwell on nothing but look straight through everything. He always spoke his mind without mincing words, while his round, pink face made him the picture of health. For him life meant happiness, a sensual, physical happiness and he approached painting in the same spirit. It was in 1908 or 1909 that he read Eugène Chevreul, the physicist's, theory of simultaneous colours which had already had such an influence on Seurat thirty years earlier. This confirmed the conclusions he had already reached intuitively. In the next few years his natural lyrical gifts found expression through the channel provided by these ideas. His main undertaking was in breaking down the prism and reassembling its elements on the canvas by a discreet though thorough division of surfaces. What Braque and Picasso did with a mandoline, fruit-dish or nude, Delaunay did with light itself, cutting it up and piecing it together again in a new way. This 'new way' implies personal research into the basic laws of painting. Apollinaire had already written "I like contemporary art because I love light more than anything: all men love light more than anything, having invented fire." Delaunay's work between 1911-1914 is a striking illustration of this thought. Like a child with its favorite toy he took the rainbow to pieces and improvised with the separate parts, but without ever going too far or betraying the rainbow's essence. He turned it into the very song of light, both airy and powerful.
Delaunay's works of that period are astonishing achievements. Form and idea are so closely united, the utterance so fused with the style, that in the forty years after him there was no painting capable of conveying such a sensation of physical joy, innocent serenity and strength combined -unless it be the painting of his wife, less candid and spiritually less spontaneous though it is.
In 1910 Delaunay married Sonia Terk, a Russian by birth, who was also a painter, and former wife of the German art-critic Wilhelm Uhde the discoverer of the 'Douanier' Rousseau. She gave him unfailing moral support and I have heard Delaunay say that but for her many a canvas would have remained unfinished. Delaunay was highly-strung, easily discouraged but just as easily stimulated to further effort.
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