Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962

DANIEL ROBBINS Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As some of you know, those of you who were here two weeks ago, this is a series of lectures on cubism and abstract painting. Two weeks ago, I spoke on Juan Gris, and this afternoon, I’m going to speak on Robert Delaunay.

Now, a great deal of both the confusion and the initial popularity [01:00] of cubism can be attributed to the fact that its chief spokesman was the poet and the man of letters, the remarkable, the fantastic personality, Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1913, some five years after cubism had been launched, some two years after cubism had become a word on the lips of everybody interested in art in Paris and all across Europe, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote or published a book called The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations. In the very beginning of this book, he set down what he believed were to be the major characteristics of cubism. And from these major characteristics, a great deal of [02:00] misunderstanding has arisen, and I’d like to take this as a point of departure.

What I show you here is a portrait of Apollinaire by Louis Marcoussis, actually a posthumous portrait. It was made in 1919. You can look at it while I read to you something that Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters in 1913. Said Apollinaire, “I can discriminate four trends in cubism. Of these, two are pure and along parallel lines. Scientific cubism is one of the pure tendencies. It is the art of painting new structures out of elements borrowed not from the reality of sight, but from the reality of insight. All men have a sense of this interior reality. A man does not have to [03:00] be cultivated in order to conceive, for example, of a round form. The geometrical aspect, which made such an impression on those who first saw the canvases of the scientific cubists, came from the fact that the essential reality was rendered with great purity, while visual accidents and anecdotes had been eliminated. The painters who follow this tendency are Picasso, whose luminous art also belongs to the other pure tendency of cubism, Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, and Juan Gris.”

Now, let’s forget about Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, and Juan Gris. Let’s take, as Apollinaire’s model of the scientific cubist, Pablo Picasso, and on the left, you’re looking at his Aficianado, the bullfight fan, from 1911. This is a slide [04:00] that some of you will recall I showed last time. Scientific cubism -- let’s accept, for the moment, this category -- consisted in this rendering of forms within a very shallow space, very tightly structured, and the forms analyzed in such a way so that one has a kind of sense of simultaneity around the object, in terms of a spectator turning around and analyzing it, looking at it on the outside from various points of view, dissecting the form, looking at them from points of view where one could not really see them. And the overall impression within this shallow space, very strict, tight rhythm, close together, even a little finicky and delicate, is one of great charm and interest. One is aware of the eyes, [05:00] of the mustache, of the mouth, of the little collar. One is aware of this clue, “Nimes,” the bullfight ring there. One is aware of the guitar, a famous cubist prop. All this has the quality, the visual quality, that I want to associate with what Guillaume Apollinaire meant by scientific cubism, one of the four major trends in cubism that he could discern.

Now, to continue reading Guillaume Apollinaire. “Physical cubism, another category, is the art,” said Apollinaire, “of painting new structures with elements borrowed, for the most part, from visual reality. This art, however, belongs in the cubist movement because of its constructive

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 discipline. It has a great future as historical painting.” Incidentally, that’s a curious reflection on Apollinaire, as a twentieth-century avant-garde person, thinking in terms [06:00] of these ancient categories, 18th and 17th century categories of genre painting, portrait painting, historical painting, etc. “Its social role,” continues Apollinaire, “is very clear, but it is not a pure art. It confuses what is properly the subject with images. The painter-physicist who created this trend is Le Fauconnier.”

Now, I didn’t have a slide of a Le Fauconnier -- they’re very hard to find -- nor a slide of a painter like Marcel Gromaire, who might, I think, fit into Apollinaire’s division of physical cubism, so I show you instead a rather recent painting by the American Charles Sheeler, a painting from 1954. This, I think, would qualify as Apollinaire’s second category, physical cubism, because, as you can see, this is the art of painting new structures with elements borrowed [07:00] exclusively from visual reality.

Now, the third trend, as Apollinaire saw it, in cubism, is this. “Orphic cubism is the other important trend of the new school. It is the art of painting new structures out of elements which have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and have been endowed by him with fullness, the fullness of reality. The work of the orphic artist must simultaneously give a pure aesthetic pleasure, a structure which is self-evident, and a sublime meaning that is a subject. This is pure art. The light in Picasso’s paintings is based on this conception,” and that is, perhaps, debatable, “to which Robert Delaunay--” [08:00] whose Circular Discs of 1912, probably, you see on the left. I say probably, because the date of this painting is much in question -- “and towards which Fernand Léger, Fracis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp are also addressing themselves.” Well, again, forget Léger, who you’ve seen upstairs, forget Picabia, forget Marcel Duchamp. Remember, this was written in 1913. And think of the word “orphism” or “orphic cubism” as associated almost entirely with the painter who is the subject of this afternoon’s lecture, Robert Delaunay.

I have it on the screen with a Matisse, simply because Apollinaire posited still a fourth kind of cubism, which he called “instinctive cubism,” and of this he says, “Instinctive cubism, the [09:00] art of painting new structures of elements which are not borrowed from visual reality but are suggested to the artist by instinct and intuition, has long tended towards orphism.” That is, he makes a relationship between instinctive cubism and the kind of painting you see on the left. “The instinctive artist lacks lucidity and an aesthetic doctrine. Instinctive cubism includes a large number of artists. Born of French impressionism, this movement has now spread all over Europe.”

Now, all of these statements, particularly these last from the category of instinctive cubism, are -- what shall I say? -- so highly speculative and so far removed from historical fact that they are of interest chiefly because it was Guillaume Apollinaire who said them, and because many people believed them, and because, for a long time, many people continued to believe them. The painting on the right is a Matisse, [10:00] Bather, from 1909. To Guillaume Apollinaire, Matisse, after being a Fauve, was also associated with the cubists, as was, indeed, every painter who was good, who was avant-garde, who was doing something fresh and different and new, all across Europe, from Matisse to Kandinsky, including the Italian futurists. And further, of these four categories, and particularly in relation to orphism and Delaunay, that paragraph defining

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 orphism, and light and color, has led to the believe that orphism consisted of nothing more, as it truly did in the eyes of Apollinaire, than that it involved the mission of reintroducing color into cubism. And if you remember the Picasso, Aficianado, how limited its color was, how brown and gray it was, and contrast that [11:00] in your memory with the vivid, swirling colors of Delaunay on the left. You can see that color, of course, was a crucial element in Delaunay’s work. What it had to do with cubism is question that we will now proceed to explore, but we will explore it within the development of Delaunay as a painter.

Delaunay was born in 1885, in Paris. His parents were very early divorced, and he went to live with an uncle. He had a kind of mixed up childhood. He came from a family that was well enough off in circumstances. He was a wretched scholar. He got very poor marks in school. To his teachers, he was a hopeless case. But he had a distinct talent, as do most people who become painters, for painting and drawing, and he was apprenticed to a man in the [12:00] decorative arts, a designer, so to speak. And from that, shortly after the turn of the century, he went off to Brittany, and he studied with people who had been in the circle of the school of Pont-Aven, followers of Paul Gauguin. Those of you who attended this series of lectures in the first semester know what considerable importance Gauguin and the school of Pont-Aven had in the development of twentieth-century painting, particularly in the direction of abstract art.

By 1904, 1905, Delaunay had swung away from the Gauguin, Pont-Aven influence, and had fallen very distinctly under the influence of neoimpressionism. You all are familiar with the art of Seurat and Signac. The painting you see on the left is called La Fillette, Little Girl, a painting from 1905 by [13:00] Robert Delaunay. Now, in it, his touch, his quality, his personality is already evident, vigorous, and bold, and strong. I’m sorry it’s not in color. I could only get this made at the last moment in black and white. You can see, however, that it has an affinity with Seurat’s famous pointillism on the right. And at this time, Delaunay also educated himself to the very complicated color theories that Seurat had developed in connection with his own studies of the physicists and color theorists, Chevreul and Rood particularly. With Seurat, one is most particularly conscious of the optical blending of colors applied each individually. With Delaunay, one would not have that same consciousness. One would be much more aware of individual flavors of color, one next to another, producing a brilliant [14:00] luminosity, and also, perhaps even more, underlining the essential structure of the painting, which, in black and white, I think, emerges very clearly, perhaps even more clearly than in the Seurat. The Seurat dates from 1889, the Delaunay from 1905.

Delaunay’s progress was astonishingly fast. In 1909, he painted a number of versions of Saint- Sévrin, a famous cathedral, a medieval cathedral. And in a sense, it’s prophetic that he was to develop that painting, which has traditionally been associated with his first cubist painting, in terms of a gothic cathedral, and a well-known one, at that.

Now, if you remember the [15:00] Picasso, Aficianado, as a kind of scientific or, if you want, even conventional cubist painting of only a few years later, and think of this, or better, if you can all conjure up in your minds, as I’m sure you can, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1908, and compare it with this, I think you’ll have to say they have rather little in common. In Picasso, the space is always shallow. In Delaunay, the space is very deep. In Delaunay, the choir, or ambulatory, really, of the cathedral, goes back and circles around. The great piers go up and set

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 up complex and enchanting rhythm, going back, and back, and back, and twisting. There is distortion, yes, [as?] the columns and the piers go up. And the distortion seems to be made not on the basis, as in Picasso, of observing a structure from different points of view, [16:00] or dissecting it visually in terms of views that are not even humanly possible, but only cerebrally possible. Instead, the distortions seem to arise from the fact -- and a fact that really must intimately be associated with the idea of a subject being a gothic cathedral -- with the fact of light cutting across the piers, coming in from windows presumably on the side, from windows in back, and dissecting these columns in a variety of fascinating ways. And what do we find on the floor of the nave? We find a curious circular rhythm. It’s odd that, in 1909, this should already show up in Delaunay’s work.

Now, this is but one version. Nine exist. The Guggenheim Museum owns one, perhaps a better one, I might say, which is presently on loan to a European exhibition. In one of these [17:00] paintings, this circular movement of light falling on the nave, on the floor of the ambulatory of the cathedral, is much more pronounced, and, as I say, it’s prophetic, because what, to the builder of this medieval cathedral, was more important than light? Why else did it rise up and take this shape? Why else was (inaudible) and the windows extended and made tall and narrow, except to let in light, which, as you all know, had a divine and symbolic importance, because light symbolized the nature of the universe, and it symbolized the divinity.

From this painting in 1909, Delaunay went on, in the same year, to paint the Eiffel Tower that you see on the left. Eiffel Towers one associates irrevocably with [18:00] Delaunay, because no one ever chose them as a subject, no one ever dreamed of treating them the way he did, and also, because he painted them throughout his life. The painting from 1909 on your left is also considered to be a kind of cubist painting, but again, compare it in your mind with the cubist painting of La Aficianado by Picasso, and see how different it is. There is tremendous depth here. Also, there is surging color. What it has in common with early cubism, perhaps, is the fact that everything is treated very broadly, that there’s a kind of modulated brushstroke here in the trees that come down, and planes here on the ground. This brushstroke, of course, is the heritage of Cezanne, which Delaunay felt, as much as any painter working in the early part of the twentieth century. But it goes back in perspective. The Champ de Mars under the [19:00] Eiffel Tower to the École Militaire, the sky broken up, yes, but no form really dissected in a truly cubist vein.

The Eiffel Tower on the right, of course, is different. It’s from a year later, and it does have a good deal in common with cubism, with scientific cubism, because, as you can see, the shape of the tower is analyzed from a variety of points of view. But something more. It is not achieved in a limited depth, as with the Picasso. Instead, there’s a tremendous surging quality of depth and of motion. And while you look at the tower, yes, from one side, on the bottom here, from another side, as if you were equal with this level of height, and finally as if you were climbing up here, and while clouds and trees surge back and for the across the painting. And incidentally, notice in both cases how the trees here, [20:00] and the shape here, and the trees here and here are very like the piers on either side of the ambulatory in the Saint-Sévrin painting. I kind of lost myself in that sentence. Notice, I was going to say, that in addition to these individual points of view, the whole curvature of the earth seems somehow underneath the mighty legs of the Eiffel Tower, and that this whole shape moves and revolves. It is not only, as it is in a conventionally

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 cubist painting, your eye, and you as a spectator, who is invited, theoretically, to walk about an object and look at it. It is, instead, that, plus the whole painting and the whole world moving as well.

If you see this in an incipient way in the painting on the right, and scarcely see [21:00] it at all in the left, the next year, he was to paint this Eiffel Tower, which is in the collection of the museum here, one of his mightiest, one of his greatest, in which the whole tower is integrated with the city in a truly thrilling way. It’s so exultant in quality, and the color is strong in the orange tints of the steel going up, and the whole vision is unbelievably complex, the turning from the inside to the outside, this side pulled back so we can see it, the arches of the second tier made metaphors with the windows on the side, twisting, turning, up and around, all about it, until finally, just the structure out of which it is made, the naked steel itself, like a telegraph [22:00] electric circuit, the things that one sees hopping across the countryside when you go off for a ride, surmounts the whole thing. And on either side, like the piers in Saint-Sévrin, the buildings of Old Paris with we spectators, and those spectators of 1910, ’11, as well, implied on different levels, that is, here, and here, and here, hanging on balconies, being at this level of buildings, underneath and penetrating with the Eiffel Tower, and being equal to it and hanging over it, and the whole thing charged with clouds. Very dynamic, very expressive, very vital, and very beautiful.

As I say, his progress was astonishing in the early years of the century. And from the [23:00] Eiffel Towers, he went on to paint a series called Windows. The painting on the right is the one we’ll start with. It’s called La Ville, The City, Number 2. It’s from 1910, 1911, and I say we start with it, because it’s clearer, it’s easier to penetrate, to see what he’s after. Of course, it’s in the same kind of vibrant color that you see in this Guggenheim Museum painting on the left, but it’s a little bit easier, I think, to acclimatize the eyes to. You can see the buildings of the city, and you can see them in a kind of perspective, as seen from above, rushing back, and then finally melting into a grid, a screen of small dots of color, luminous [24:00] prisms of light. If you see it in black and white, as I’m sure you do, it’s also easy enough to see it in the painting on the left called Simultaneous Windows, that is, all these buildings here, here, suggestions of them, a fascinating grid of life seen through light, not seen dissolved in light, as one might see a city in an impressionist painting, but seen as if they could be realized only by light.

Now, at this time, we return to Guillaume Apollinaire. Guillaume Apollinaire had not yet written The Cubist Painters, the Aesthetic Meditations. However, he just concluded a disastrous [25:00] love affair with his beloved Marie Laurencin, and he was so broken up that he was the despair of all his friends. One of his friends was Robert Delaunay, and his wife, Sonia. Many people write, probably romanticizing a little bit, that perhaps Apollinaire would never have pulled through from this particular crisis if it hadn’t been for the Delaunays. In any event, Apollinaire went and he lived with the Delaunays for about six weeks. While he lived there on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, he saw paintings of these windows on Delaunay’s easel. It was the first thing he saw every morning when he woke up. It inspired him to write a poem, a very famous poem, called Les Fenêtres. It’s supposed to be the first simultaneous [26:00] poem. Whether it was or not is a question that we’d better let the literary historians decide. Now, I want to read you this poem, because it sheds -- in a rather poetic way, it’s true -- a certain

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 amount of light on what Delaunay, or at least what Apollinaire thought Delaunay was getting at in this kind of painting.

[Windows, 1968] The yellow fades from red to green / When aras sing in their native forest / Pihis’ giblets / There is a poem to be done on the bird with only one wing / We will send it by telephone / Giant traumatism / It makes one’s eyes run / There is one pretty one among all the girls from Turin / The unfortunate young man blows his nose in his white necktie / You will lift the curtain / And now look at the window opening / Spiders when hands wove the [27:00] light / Beauty paleness unfathomable violet tints / We shall try in vain to take our ease / They start at midnight / When one has time, one has liberty / Bigorneaux Lotte multiple suns and the Sea Urchin of the Setting sun / An old pair of yellow shoes in front of the window / Towers / Towers are streets / Wells / Wells are marketplaces / Wells / Hollow trees which shelter vagabond cypresses / The octoroons sing songs of dying / to their chestnut-colored wives / And the goose honk-honk trumpets in the north / When raccoon hunters / Scrape their pelts / Gleaming diamond / Vancouver / Where the train white with snow in the fires of the night / Flees the winter / O Paris / The yellow fades from red to green / Paris Vancouver [28:00] Hyères Maintenon New York and the Antilles / The window opens like an orange / Lovely fruit of light.

I imagine it didn’t make much sense to you. If you try and make sense of it, if you try and follow it sentence by sentence, it doesn’t. It’s not even sentences. But towers, wells, wells are marketplaces, telegraph, telephone, speed, movement, Vancouver, Paris, the north, the south, the whole world. This, I think, is what Delaunay and Apollinaire understood in the Simultaneous Windows. The window looked on the world, and it was an incredible world in 1910, 1911, 1912, and these men appreciated how incredible it was, what communication meant, and how everything [29:00] was a part of everything else. Well, we’ll return to this in a moment, because our subject gets rather more complicated.

Here are some more windows. By Simultaneous Windows, can we mean anything a little bit more technical, a little bit more scientific than what I read to you in the poem by Apollinaire? And I’m afraid the answer is really no, at least no as far as 1911 is concerned. In these two paintings, one can take them apart, enjoy them, analyze them. You see, the whole thing refines still more. The little patches of color are no longer little but grand and extraordinary in their juxtaposition, one beside the other. There are, perhaps, hints of the city on the other side of the windows, and hints of the world. Perhaps this is a hint -- it certainly is a hint -- of the Eiffel Tower, a shadow. This one, and this painting, which, as you can see, is [30:00] basically the same compositional structure, with the same tall movement of the tower, and the same kind of shifting planes that rush across, that indicate light, a light-suffused world here present in this painting. In addition, something very curious, a kind of fool-the-eye effect. Why underline this, this extra bit of structure? So that probably now that you’ve noticed it, you read the whole picture as suddenly coming to you, because you see this line, and this line, and this one, and this one, implicit. And yet, here are two windows on the other side of the window through which you look and contemplate the whole world.

By 1912, Delaunay was ready to attempt something very big in the way of a simultaneous window, and he made this one. Characteristics here are very similar to the ones we’ve [31:00]

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 seen before, except the range of color throughout is even greater. Now, by this time, Delaunay, who, as I said, had been a very poor student in school, who everyone says, everyone who knew him, was a genius, but the most inarticulate genius, perhaps, that ever walked the earth in the early part of the twentieth century, was trying desperately to set down his ideas on the significance of light, because that was what he was painting. That was what he was convinced he was painting, not the object, not objects; not even, he thought, symbols of objects; but simply light.

So from his manuscript, a manuscript written in the summer of 1912, shortly after this painting was made, I read you a translation of just his thoughts as they were put down, except I punctuated them to a certain extent. [32:00] And the way he put them down, they weren’t punctuated at all. It just rolled on. I give you a part of this, for what it’s worth. I’m afraid that even more than the Apollinaire poem, you may not be able to follow it in a conceptual sense, but the ring of what Delaunay was concerned with will come across.

“Impressionism is the knowledge of light in painting. Light comes to us by our senses. Without the visual sense, no light, no movement. Light in nature creates the movement of colors. Movement is produced by the relationships of unequal measures of contrasts of colors, and that constitutes reality. This reality is posited on depth. We see unto the stars,” and that’s an expression that recurs frequent in Delaunay, and I think, perhaps, it’s a rather appropriate expression to use today, because we’ve [33:00] seen it in the New York Times, and in the Tribune, and in a lot of other places. “We see unto the stars and reality becomes simultaneous rhythm. Simultaneity in light is harmony, the rhythm of colors, which creates the vision of man. Human vision attains the greatest reality when it comes to us directly from the contemplation of the universe,” that is, not from the contemplation of objects, not from the analysis of objects, but from the contemplation of light in the universe. Then he goes on to talk about auditory perception. He goes on to talk about ordinary painting and to condemn it, but I don’t think I’ll read you any more, because it’s rather difficult the way he wrote it.

Instead, we’ll give a small side tribute to the Swiss German painter, Paul Klee, who had the responsibility of translating [34:00] this incredibly knotty, difficult manuscript into German, because the article on light was published in a German magazine in 1912, early in 1912. And Klee had to read this thing in French and put it in some kind of logical order. And he did, so I’ll read you just one sentence by Paul Klee, translated from the German back into the English. And it makes perfect sense and sums up what Delaunay was doing. “Art must free itself from the object and from all descriptive and literary implications. Its task is to give expression and form to the manifold rhythms and harmonies of color, and to raise light to plastic independence.” Now, that’s fairly clear, I think.

At the same time, [35:00] curiously enough, that Delaunay was pursuing these extraordinary discoveries, unparalleled by anyone in Europe -- well, I shouldn’t really say that. They were paralleled, but by painters that we will discuss later on -- but to a greater extent than anyone in Europe, in making abstract pictures. At the same time, I say, he was also becoming more and more, in another aspect of his work, of a cubist, in the conventional sense. This is his gigantic painting, The City of Paris, on the left. What does it consist of? His favorite themes, the Eiffel Tower, the apartments, the houses from Paris on the right, the Seine on the left with a boat and a

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 bridge, and more houses, and a touch of the simultaneous windows [36:00] from two years earlier, and in front, these enormous -- one almost might say, at least by comparison, these monstrous -- three graces, to symbolize the beauty, the grace of Paris. Well, how curious it is that this kind of element, the three graces, should have crept in to a painter whose whole effort moved so quickly from reality through the study of light to the windows.

And on the right, you see a 1912 painting he made of the cathedral at Laon. To be sure, it’s charged with that same quality of movement and excitement that you see in his other work, but the space is relatively shallow, as in a conventional cubist painting, and the shapes are dissected, as they would be in a conventionally cubist painting, [37:00] and the object is very much of concern to him here. So there is a kind of parallel development in Delaunay in these exciting years, 1910 to 1914.

And at the same time he was doing these, he took his windows one step further and produced these paintings, which, as you can see, are very close. One of them is called Circular Forms, and the other one is called Sun and Moon. Now he is painting light. The one on the right, called Sun and Moon -- which is the sun, and which is the moon? This is the sun, and this is the moon. Why? Because as far as Delaunay was concerned, [38:00] when light came from the sun, and the light entered the atmosphere, it was slowed down, and it produced vibrant contrasts, sharp contrasts of color. That is, all these layers of atmosphere that the light had to go through made this happen. He knew light was composed of the colors of the spectrum, and he could conceive of this separation taking place as the light went through atmosphere. But when light came from the moon at night, when you looked through the night to the moon, the moon’s light was but a reflection of the light from the sun, [39:00] and its quality was different. One had dissonances, and they are treated with broader bands of color, instead of smaller, sharper divisions. So whether he calls the painting as it is called on the right, Sun and Moon, or whether it’s simply called Circular Forms, as here on the left, this was Delaunay’s preoccupation, to paint the nature of light.

He did it in an empirical way, you can be sure. This notion of what looking at the sun or looking at the moon means is not something that Delaunay wrote down. Actually, it’s something that a Delaunay scholar named Pierre Francastel wrote down. When you look at the sun, a movement is created of complementary colors. Contrasts dominate. The transformation of colored zones through the atmosphere is not [40:00] so rapid as the sun is bright. That is, the intensity of the sun is so great that the light coming through the atmosphere cannot catch up with it, catch up with it quantitatively in terms of the brilliance of the sun itself. On the other hand, looking at the moon, one registers dissonances between the colors, not so much contrast, for the movement of the light from the moon being reflected implies a multiplication of zones of passage. That is, not only does it go through the atmosphere, but it’s a reflection of the light from the sun. Hence, the circles are more numerous, thicker, more charged with nuance.

When Delaunay puts the sun and the moon together in a circular format, because circularity is the rhythm of the universe, he feels, then he becomes the Delaunay the orphist, the man who [41:00] sings of the universe to his greatest and most powerful extent. That is, movement, for this man, Delaunay, in painting these pictures, is not the suggestion of the displacement of objects. Movement is the life of light.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962

If you look at a painting by Severini next to a painting by Delaunay, you’ll know what I just meant by movement. Delaunay feels that movement in art is a thing in itself. It cannot be achieved except by understanding light and color, light and color by themselves. Severini, on the other hand, and even more than Severini, some of the other futurists, feels that the best way [42:00] to express movement is by depicting the displacement of an object in space, hence this painting, The Red Cross Train, a war painting. The train goes charging, one, two, three, four, across the picture. It gets displaced. Your eye, the eye of a solitary observer, a not-moving observer, watches this thing. If you think of Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, you will understand this as well. That is, the same object moving from place to place. That is one kind of movement, and that is a kind of movement that Delaunay doesn’t feel is adequate to the nature of art.

If you look at a painting, a conventionally cubist painting by Georges Braque, like this one, [43:00] The Small Round Table of 1910-11, you’ll see also how different the two kinds of movement are. In the Braque painting, you have a different kind of simultaneity, because it depends on your looking down on the table, as, of course, you do, and straight at the table at the same time. This is simultaneous points of view, but very different from the kind of simultaneity and the contrast that Delaunay is talking about. Braque analyzes each shape, like the violin, in this kind of fine grisaille of pale grays and browns. And the movement is very discreet and very quiet, and the movement in Delaunay, which is supposed to be the movement of light understood through the movement of color, is charged with energy, [44:00] and has what he felt to be the circular and essential movement of the universe.

So, then, here is Robert Delaunay, by 1913, painting abstract art, and feeling that he is not painting it out of his emotion, but painting it because he set himself a plastic problem, the nature of light and the nature of color. What was he to do for the remainder of his life? And this is rather interesting. In a way, it’s curious. In a way, perhaps, it’s even a little sad. The war came, and Delaunay tried to combine two important things to him, two disciplines, cubism and abstract [45:00] art based on the nature of light and color. This is called The Woman with the Umbrella, and what he’s trying to do, perhaps, is to show how light, circular movement, circular rhythm, simultaneous rhythm, is a part of objects. He is trying to anchor it to his fundamentally cubist understanding of what a figure is, or an object is, seen from many points of view. And it didn’t always come off. Sometimes it led him into a kind of intellectual cul de sac, even though sometimes the paintings -- and I suppose that, for us, is the most important thing -- were very beautiful.

I think scarcely any painting describes this effort of Delaunay to combine circularity and color with the analysis of objects, [43:00] an analysis like a cubist analysis of objects, better than these paintings called The Team from Cardiff, or The Football Team. And at the same time, no painting better sums up this whole attitude, which Delaunay felt more than anybody in the early years of the twentieth century, as to what the new art was all about, and what simultaneity was all about. Let’s look at this one first. They’re very close. Here, obviously, is the football team, and here is one human being, very athletic, of course, but making an enormous effort and leaping from the ground for this very clear football. But in the background is the whirl of a Ferris wheel, and above that is an airplane. And here, New York, you can make it out, Paris, [47:00]

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962

(inaudible). Some reference to telegraph communication, some reference to contact all across the world, a relation, then, between the enormous effort and striving of man, and this signboard, meaning, what? “Astra,” to the stars, to the sun, which Delaunay repeats over, and over, and over again.

Here in the later version of the painting, “Magic”, because this is magic, and “Astra,” to the starts, [an astronaut way?], if you like, because it’s achieved. And here, the men, and here the football, not so clear a football, but really a disc, and the Ferris wheel sweeping up, and the plane, finally, high above. And it’s no coincidence that Robert Delaunay should have painted this [48:00] work, in the same effort, trying to combine his visionary view of the universe with the perceptual analysis of particular things, like an Eiffel Tower, and a particular event.

This is Homage a Blériot, the man who first flew across the Channel, the English Channel. And this, of course, is the biplane, which, I suppose, gives a kind of quaint historical nature to the whole picture. But this was the effort. These are the circular rhythms of the universe. This is what the man, the airplane propeller, feels. This is what he looks down and sees. This is what Delaunay was imagining when he painted the Eiffel Tower from on top. This whole tremendous effort, and if you’re all thinking, as I can’t help but think, perhaps corny as it is, as Colonel Glenn and orbiting the earth, there is, in this tradition of painting light [49:00] and the nature of the universe, still very much in the line of Robert Delaunay’s first researches, a man, a New York Painter, an American painter, who has been doing very much the same kind of thing, stems from this tradition. Perhaps you remember Alfred Jensen’s Homage to Yuri Gagarin, which was shown in the first series of one-man shows given at this museum, and this, his Darkness at West, Lightness at East, which was in the abstract expressionist and images show, and is now a part of our collection. That is, Homage to Yuri Gagarin, and you might call it now Homage to Colonel Glenn, is in the nature of the same kind of tribute as Homage to Blériot, and further, is in the same preoccupation with the nature of light and the nature of color. This was a tradition [50:00] that was brought to life by Delaunay in these years.

But let’s go on. By 1915 and 1916, with the war on in Europe, Delaunay was in Portugal and in Spain. And here, his effort to try and join the circularity of the discs with a kind of concrete observation of physical fact becomes almost heartbreaking. He painted some 17 or 18 paintings called Portuguese Still Life. This is one called Portuguese Still Life with a Serving Maid. What has he done? He’s trying to make every object in a still life rotate before your eyes. They look here, perhaps, a little bit like fried eggs, but they’re melons, and melons cut, and the background, and the cloth, and bowls, and everything, all supposed to turn the same way as his discs turn, and have the same kind of emotional significance. Perhaps [51:00] also, in a sense, they’re an investigation of what happens when light hits an object and circles around it. But he repeated this experiment for painting after painting after painting, and one feels that he was never satisfied, although, to be sure, one feels that some of the paintings were very, very beautiful.

And after that, what happened to him? He painted more Eiffel Towers, the one on the right from 1914, the one on the left a little bit earlier, this just a little bit before the Portuguese Still Life. And his Eiffel Towers rarely lost that surging feeling, that quality of tremendous space, and surge, and thrust that they have, except he painted them, and painted them, and painted them. As here, in the mid-’20s. He’s on top looking down at the Champ de Mars [52:00] underneath the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962

Eiffel Tower, and there is this suggestion of a circle, and yet, somehow, it’s all terribly anchored to the object, and somehow, doesn’t quite come off.

Or in a painting from 1926. Delaunay tries to combine his most famous, his most successful paintings, all together in one long, narrow panel, and one wonders, why does he do this? Here the nude, one of the three graces. Here the Eiffel Tower tearing up into the sky like a telegraph tower. Here the circular discs, but very small. Here a bridge of Paris. Here the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and in the background, the [Champs du Député?]. In other words, was he, perhaps, trying to make his art a little bit more palatable to the public, [53:00] which, for the most part at that time, didn’t understand it.

He made portraits, like this one on the left of the surrealist poet Philippe Supo. And in the background, his beloved Eiffel Tower, treated in the same way, this like a 1911 painting by Delaunay, with the clouds, framed by a curtain here and here, just as Saint-Séverin was framed by piers on both sides and in the middle, a perfectly conventional, albeit very powerful, portrait of the great, or at least very interesting, poet Supo. And he painted more very athletic pictures, but without the same kind of striving or the same kind of motion, as in this, The Runners, of 1926.

Now, one more element, I think, is very important, perhaps a little bit humorous, because this so recalls the epic. This is from the mid-1920s, and it’s a portrait -- [54:00] I mean, it’s a photograph of Delaunay’s wife, the Russian painter Sonia Terk Delaunay, in her simultaneous coat, and in her simultaneous car. What did this mean? Was it just a stunt? No, it wasn’t just a stunt. Those of you who were here in the first semester series of lecture remember how we talked about the art nouveau and the social aspects of contemporary painting. And these social aspects were in the poem of Apollinaire, that is, New York, Vancouver, Paris. That is, everything a part of everything else. Art is not so exclusively fine that you go into a museum like a palace and stand in front of the picture and worship it. It is part of everyday life. You should dress this way because it’s exciting and vibrant and vivid. And Sonia Delaunay, perhaps more than any other person in the twentieth century, lived this kind of life in the ’20s. And beyond that, this [55:00] photograph, I think, has much of a kind of pre-flapper flavor, of a kind of a high-class bohemianism, and it’s full of charm, and I think conveys to you something of the spirit of their life together.

But as far as Delaunay’s painting was concerned, from 1915 to 1930, with only a few exceptions, he repeated himself. He seemed to have lost faith in the importance and the significance of his discoveries. Around 1930, though, he came back, and he came back very strong to circular motion. One reason he did it was because some of his painter friends finally grasped the idea. One of these, one very important member of this group, was Albert Gleizes, whom we’ll talk about in two weeks’ time. So Delaunay, [56:00] around 1930, went back to the discs, and they became unbelievably complicated. They became the journey, as far he was concerned, the rhythmic, exciting journey of light as it left the sun and as it reached the earth. This one, called Rhythm Without End, sums it up.

And finally, this painting on the right, Rhythm Without End, recapitulates this journey. A completely abstract art, an art abstract on the basis of an interest, a mental interest, in what was

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism and Abstract Art: Robert Delaunay” by Daniel Robbins, 1962 the nature of art, what was plastic, what was light, and not an abstract art coming from the urge to throw one’s feelings or emotions on a canvas. A different kind of abstract art from that, for example, which originated [57:00] in Germany. And on the left, I show you, to conclude, a photograph of Robert Delaunay just a few years before he died -- he died in 1940 -- standing against one of his enormous paintings. And this also has the value of indicating to you that it wasn’t simply color alone, but texture that occupied him.

In two weeks, if you choose to come back, you can hear about Albert Gleizes, another particularly interesting master who came from cubism and went to abstraction, and involved in his life and his art some of the more interesting, some of the most complicated, notions of twentieth-century painting. Thank you very much. [58:00]

END OF AUDIO FILE 615214T33_01.mp3

Robert Delaunay / Daniel Robbins. 1962/3/1. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York