Seeing Robert Delaunay's Structure of Vision

Coming into Sight: Seeing Robert Delaunay’s Structure of Vision*

GORDON HUGHES

Take my hand, traveler, and let us go up the tower. Look below, and look around. Look right to the end of the horizon, look From north to south. Everywhere your eye happens to fall It attaches itself with ﬁre, like the eye of a snake.1 —Alfred de Vigny, “Paris” (1831)

Robert Delaunay’s 1912 Window series unfolds slowly in time. Over time our seeing develops and over time we learn to make sense of what we see. At first it is the Eiffel Tower that comes into sight, quickly followed by two small windows on a building front in the lower part of the painted frame. With a little more time we learn to see the tower’s supporting columns. Slowly the flat, colorful grid begins to push back into a recognizable space; images form, sense emerges. Eventually, and with greater difficulty, we learn to see a face—the artist’s face, our face— caught in the reflection of the window. The dark green smudge of paint two-thirds of the way down the right hand side suddenly takes on meaning as lips, and the quarter circle of yellow beneath it as a chin. The ear nestles in the right-hand corner of the base of the tower. The jaw, and then the neck, extend the sloping, fragmented line of the tower a fraction away from the corner of the canvas. And when we finally notice the rectangular form that cuts diagonally across the surface of each painting in the series, it seems to be just a question of time before it too makes sense. It seems to be waiting, patiently, to come into sight. Is this another image, mirrored, like the face, in the reflective surface of the window? Is it a part of the cityscape outside, something we see as we look through the window?

* Many thanks to Jennifer King, Gary Peters, Michelle Foa, and Hal Foster for their helpful feedback. 1. Prends ma main, voyageur, et montons sur la Tour. / Regarde en bas, et regarde à l’entour. / Regarde jusqu’au bout de l’horizon, regarde / Du nord au sud. Partout où ton oeil se hasarde / Qu’il s’attache avec feu, comme l’oeil du serpent.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826461 by guest on 01 October 2021 Robert Delaunay. Simultaneous Windows (1st Part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica). 1912. © L and M Services B.V., Amsterdam 20020816.

Or is this altogether too literal a view? Perhaps it has nothing do with windows and everything to do with painting—the product of purely formal considerations rather than those of the literal properties of transparency and reflection. In learning to make sense of the view from this particular window— Simultaneous Windows (1st Part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica)—we combine conceptual knowledge with sensory information. We combine, in other words, what we know with what we see. Knowing the title—knowing that this is a window—it makes sense to see the two small marks as windows on a distant building; it makes sense that the orthogonal grid can become a cityscape. As we look through the window, however, we also know from experience that transparency can flip into reflection and that, unexpectedly, we can catch a glimpse of ourselves, caught in the act of seeing. Delaunay reflects the act of seeing back to us. But more than just the image of vision—more than just the image of a face that each successive viewer can learn to see as his or her own—Delaunay’s window reflects the actual process of seeing.

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If Delaunay slows down our gaze, as I want to suggest, in order that we learn to see not only images but vision itself, this is not at all how he has been received by art history. Quite the contrary, in fact, as we can see in Rosalind Krauss’s book The Optical Unconscious (1994), or in Pascal Rousseau’s catalogue essay for the 1999 Delaunay exhibition at the Pompidou Center, Paris. For both Krauss and Rousseau, Delaunay is a “retinalist,” a term coined by the Cubists to denigrate Impressionism’s attempt to capture the frenzied pace of modern life as it darts across the surface of the eye. Retinalism is a model of vision premised on speed— a pictorial blink of an eye that pulls a single frozen image from the continuous stream of optical sensation. Rousseau thus writes, “The painting of Robert Delaunay is 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.”2 Or as Krauss writes, “[T]he ‘arrêt à la rétine,’ the stopping of the analytic process at the retina, . . . [became] a kind of self-sufficient or autonomous realm of activity. . . . 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. . . .”3 Far from exemplifying the naive retinalism that Krauss sees, Delaunay’s frequent references to simultaneous contrast—a theory of chromatic retinal mixing developed by the nineteenth-century optical theorist Michel-Eugène Chevreul—stand as evidence to the depth of his engagement with modern optical theory. It is true, as Krauss points out, that Chevreul’s theory is concerned with the nature of retinal impressions. But to construe this as a commitment to “retinalism” on Delaunay’s part is to miss what was crucial not only to Delaunay but to modern optical theory in general. For by the mid-nineteenth century, the central concern of modern optical science was the problem of how we move beyond the surface of the retina. Counterintuitive as it may seem, modern theories of vision became increasingly aware that there exists a fundamental difference between the image formed on the retina and the perceptual image that we actually see. Indeed, it was this realization—that optical sensation is distinct from actual visual perception—that formed the essential divide between modern and premodern theories of vision.4 Thus, not only is the physiology of vision conditioned

2. Pascal Rousseau, Visions Simultanées: L’Optique de Robert Delaunay (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999), p. 77. 3. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 124. 4. The breach between external optical sensation (such as an external light source) and “pure” optical sense data, as it is generated within the internal physiology of the viewer’s optical and nervous system, is made explicit, for example, in the optical theory of Hermann von Helmholtz: “We have already seen enough to answer the question whether it is possible to maintain the natural and innate conviction that the quality of our sensations, and especially our sensations of sight, give us a true impression of corresponding qualities of the outer world. It is clear they do not. . . . Pressure upon the eyeball, a feeble current of electricity passing through it, a narcotic drug carried to the retina by the blood, are capable of exciting the sensation of light just as well as sunbeams. The most complete

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by binocularity, the absence of clearly defined figure-ground distinctions, and the left-to-right, upside-down inversion of the external image on the retina, it also produces a retinal image that is completely two-dimensional. The central preoccupation of modern optical theory, therefore, was how we move from the flat mosaic of colors that kaleidoscopically form the retinal image, to the perception of space within everyday, normative seeing. How does the two-dimensional retinal image become the three-dimensional experience of everyday vision? In response to this problem, modern optical theory correctly concluded that the attenuated retinal information of the eye is coupled in the brain with experiential memory, so that in the act of visual perception we are always combining what we know with what we see. Even though any given three-dimensional object is registered by the retina as flat optical data, we know from experience that it recedes in space according to certain consistent and predictable principles. In the act of looking, therefore, it is the brain that supplies the missing spatial information that is absent from pure optical sense data—it is the brain that supplies the memory of space. Because this process of cognitively merging the memory of space with the flat optical information of the retina is always preconscious, we have not only no sense of this process within everyday vision, but also no memory of the fact that we once had to learn how to see. For visual perception is a process acquired in early childhood, when the infant must learn how the space in which it moves, or the dimensional form of the object which it feels, corresponds to the image that appears in its eye. Hermann von Helmholtz describes this process of learning how to see in his 1867 essay “On the Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision”: A child seizes whatever is presented to it, turns it over and over again, looks at it, touches it, and puts it in its mouth. . . . After he has looked at such a toy every day for weeks on end, he learns at last all the perspective images which it presents. . . . By this means the child learns to recognize the different views which the same object can afford in connection with the movements which he is constantly giving it. The conception of the shape of any given object, gained in this manner, is the result of associating all these visual images.5 As von Helmholtz makes clear, the interpretation of visual data by the brain always entails a preconscious act of judgment in which the brain must decide how best to interpret the flat visual cues of pure optical data. Knowledge and sensation combine to create perception as a learned process, or, as Delaunay put it in his

difference offered by our various sensations . . . does not, as we now see, at all depend upon the nature of the external object, but solely upon the central connections of the nerves which are affected” (Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision” [1867] in Helmholtz on Perception: Its Physiology and Development, ed. Richard M. Warren and Roslyn P. Warren [New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1968], p. 99). 5. Ibid., pp. 127–28.

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1912 essay “Light”: “Our understanding is correlative to our perception. We must seek to see.”6 This process of learning to combine what we know with what we see is performed in the act of looking at Delaunay’s Window. In learning to discern the face we must combine what we see—the flat mosaic of colors on the surface of the canvas and the painted frame—with what we know—that windows are not only transparent but also reflective. We know from experience that it makes sense to look for a face reflected in a window. Less apparent, however, is how to interpret the diagonal, rectangular form that continues to nag both our visual and conceptual sense. How do we begin to make sense of this shape? Looking out from another window, Roland Barthes also considers the Eiffel Tower in relation to what he calls “the new sensibility of vision.” For Barthes the tower engages two distinct forms of looking. There is the image of the tower as it is seen by the viewer—the image that we see in the center of Delaunay’s Window. But there is also the view from the tower onto the panoramic vista of the city below. When we look at the tower, we are simply looking, in the unreflective everyday manner of ordinary vision. Looking down from the top of the tower, however, enacts an altogether different visual process. For this aerial view forces the viewer into a continuous dialectic between the mind and vision. Barthes thus describes the visual experience of the viewer looking down from the top of the tower: “In Paris spread out beneath him, he spontaneously distinguishes separate—because known—points—and does not stop linking them, perceiving them within a great functional space; in short, he separates and groups; Paris offers itself to him as an object virtually prepared, exposed to the intelligence, but which he must construct as a final activity of the mind.”7 In laying bare the structure of vision, the aerial view demands that the mind cooperate with the eye in an act of visual interpretation. Separating and grouping, moving between recognized fragments and their position within the overall structure, the mind must negotiate between what is known and what is seen. Visual perception, as it is experienced and seen from the top of the tower, is thus a process that takes place over time as the mind pieces together all the parts of the visual puzzle, moving between the memory of past experience and what is given in sight. Barthes continues: Take some view of Paris taken from the Eiffel Tower; here you make out the hill sloping down from Chaillot, there the Bois de Boulogne; but where is the Arc de Triomphe? You don’t see it and its absence compels you to inspect the panorama once again, to look for this point which is missing in your structure; your knowledge struggles with your

6. Robert Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957), p. 147. 7. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Jonathon Cape, 1982), p. 243.

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perception, and in a sense, that is what intelligence is: to reconstitute, to make memory and sensation cooperate so as to produce in your mind a simulacrum of Paris.8 Our knowledge struggles with our perception—this, as Barthes states, is what we are able to see from the top of the tower—the view from above, looking down onto the structure of vision. Given that, for Barthes, it is the view from the top of the tower that opens onto a distinctly modern sensibility of vision, it begins to make logical sense that Delaunay too would be interested in this view. And from this logical sense we can begin, at last, to see visual sense, for if we look at the view from above the tower—as in the aerial photograph published in 1909 in the journal Comoedia—we notice a familiar rectangular form that cuts diagonally across the image.9 As if giving us a clue as to the importance of this image, Delaunay

8. Ibid. 9. As Pascal Rousseau notes, Delaunay was a regular reader of the journal Comoedia and it is therefore likely that he saw Arsène Alexandre’s article “L’Art et L’Air” (Comoedia, October 23, 1909), where this photograph was reproduced. See footnote 19 in Pascal Rousseau’s “La construction du simultané: Robert Delaunay et l’aéronautique,” Revue de l’Art 112 (1996). I am indebted to Rousseau’s essay in which I ﬁrst saw the aerial photograph of the Eiffel Tower. Rousseau discusses the importance of aerial views to Delaunay’s work, but does but does not make the connection between the aerial view of the tower and the rectangular form of the Champs de Mars in the Window series.

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reworked it in his 1922 lithograph The Eiffel Tower and the Champs de Mars. Just as we learn to see our face reflected in the window, so too do we learn to see how its conspicuous curves double as the arabesques of the garden seen from above. And in the same way we learn to see how the rough miters of the painted frame fit, with a little adjustment, into the intersecting streets and paths of the aerial photograph. Like Barthes, Delaunay presents us with a view of the tower that serves as both an image of seeing and an image of the structure of seeing. Lest it appear that these views of and from the tower are too reliant on Barthes’s particular vantage point, however, it is important to note that we can find this simultaneity of aerial and lateral vision in a source more proximate to Delaunay, and with which he was directly engaged—the paintings of Picasso. Leo Steinberg has recognized this

Left: Aerial view of the Eiffel Tower, published in Comoedia. 1909. Above: Delaunay. The Eiffel Tower and the Champs de Mars. 1922. © L and M Services B.V., Amsterdam 20020816.

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tension of aerial and lateral points of view in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Wholly distinct from the Cubist cliché of “simultaneous views,” Steinberg sees the second nude from the left, “the nude with the pinnacle elbow,” as a recumbent figure—a gisante—“but seen in bird’s eye perspective.” Both lying down and standing up, the viewer’s perspective flips unstably between a view from overhead to a view from straight on, such that, as Steinberg states, “one has to push mental levers to keep an erected gisante lying down.”10 It was Krauss, however, who first saw how this doubling of views in the work of Picasso operates in relation to modern optical physiology. In describing the 1909 Horta landscapes, she demonstrates how the viewer’s point of view shuttles between two discrete visual orientations—between a bird’s-eye view down onto the landscape below and a lateral view onto the field of vision before the viewer: One feels suspended above the ground of the painting looking down into a kind of pit, whereas when one looks at the contours of the houses—at shape—one feels oneself to be confronting a set of elevations set like flats parallel to one’s own upright body. It is as though sight presupposes a projection out of the body towards a horizon so that the visual field is conceived of as parallel to the plane of the body; but touch orients the body to the ground beneath its feet—that is, to a plane perpendicular to the visual one. And even though the picture surface can integrate these two functions, it cannot determine the orientation a viewer must take towards it.11 Just as the infant, in learning to see, must learn to combine the separate sensory registers of how an object feels with how it is registered in the eye, so too does Picasso take the distinct views of lateral vision (sight) and the aerial vision (touch, body) and integrate them into the perceptual unity of the painting. For Krauss, Picasso looks skeptically at the space that spreads out so naturally before him, questioning the seamless appearance of depth that presents itself so effortlessly to his vision. Picasso is convinced that vision is not telling the whole truth; that it is covering over the cracks within our perceptual experience. It is this skepticism that causes Picasso to look down on vision, and in so doing, he sees that vision is informed as much by our sense of touch as it is by our sight.12

10. Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (Spring 1988), p. 28. 11. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cubist Epoch,” Artforum 9, no. 6, (February 1971), pp. 32–38. In addition to the Horta landscapes, Krauss also sees Picasso’s still lifes as enacting the doubling of lateral and bird’s-eye-vision. Describing the oval shape of Picasso’s 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning she writes, “this oval can be interpreted as a literal table top down onto which one looks at objects in plan, or as an upright frame which fans the contents of the visual ﬁeld across its enclosed surface” (p. 33). 12. Delaunay’s use of aerial and lateral views becomes a kind of scotoma in Krauss’s view of Delaunay as a “retinalist.” For Krauss, Delaunay and Braque represent a form of Cubist production that maintains a classical understanding of perception, in which vision and touch are bound together within the same sensory network. Krauss writes, “If in Picasso’s Analytic Cubism the cues that signal the two sensory strata—touch and sight—are kept rigorously separate, such a separation is a function of the logic driving this production, a logic erected on the premise that they are simply not transparent to

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826461 by guest on 01 October 2021 In looking down onto the structure of vision Picasso forces us to separate and to group: to separate bodily and tactile memory (how we move through space, how an object feels to the touch) from optical information, and to group these discrete forms of sense data as “a final activity of the mind.” This simultaneous separating and reassembling of sight from touch is also performed in a curious detail in Delaunay’s Window. If we look at the rough, conspicuous miters of the painted frame, we see how Delaunay has carefully delimited each miter with paint, so that two or more colors meet along the exact seam of the wooden joint. This holds true in all but the upper right corner of the frame, where we see the light blue cross over the forty- ﬁve-degree angle of the miter with an exacting deliberation. It is as if Delaunay were at pains to show how the coarse frame that we can feel, and the color that we see, have been cleaved apart from one another—separated as distinct orders of sensory information— only to be reassembled in the rest of the frame. It is as if in prying the tactile form of the frame from its corresponding color, Delaunay is intent on showing not simply the structure of painting, but how it relates to the structure of the viewer’s vision. If we look again at the reﬂected face it is strange to note that as interested in vision as Delaunay is, the eyes are not visible. He has left them either

one another. That such is not the case for Braque accounts for all those stylistic differences that so many scholars have noted. . . . Braque’s conception of structuring the picture through the mechanism of transparent planes—his particular use of passage to create a system of overlap in which vision and touch will be functions of the same interlocking network—can be seen in the painting he made of Sacré-Coeur in late 1909, where the picture he creates is in everything but its palette a precedent for Delaunay’s Windows. Picasso’s painting of the same subject from the same place, even though unﬁnished, makes clear how resistant he is to what would later come to be called ‘simultanism’” (Rosalind Krauss, “The Motivation of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992], p. 270). For more on what Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois call “horizontal” and “vertical” vision, see their Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

Delaunay. Simultaneous Windows (1st Part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica). Detail. 1922. © L and M Services B.V., Amsterdam 20020816.

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unpainted or, possibly, hidden by the rectangular band that extends down from the upper right side of the canvas. It is as though the face is peeping out from behind this vertical rectangular form. Indeed, the more we look at this multicolored, upright band, the more that it suggests the reverse side of the painting at which we are looking, reflected, along with the artist’s face, in the act of its making and seeing. And as we come to see the reverse side of the reflected canvas, the dark rectangular extension that hugs the right side of the frame slides into view as the easel. None of this is stable or assured enough to guarantee the identity of the face, however. It continues to fluctuate between the face that each viewer takes as his or her own, and that of the artist, who was already there—or so we assume— prior to the viewer. “Seen or seeing?” Foucault asks in front of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Seen and seeing we resolve in front of Delaunay’s Window.

The connection between Delaunay’s Window and Las Meninas is not gratuitous. In both paintings the artist can be seen staring out from behind his easel at a potentially infinite number of viewers who can assume the position of a subject that is both reflected and seen by the painting. Famously, Foucault describes the Velázquez painting as a reciprocal play between a representation of the world that precedes the viewer, in which the model was there long before we just happened to butt in, and a viewer who assumes the position of the subject, as though it were the viewer who had been the model all along. For Foucault, classical representation is thus constituted by this reciprocity, moving between a world that exists prior to and independent of the viewer, and a world that comes into being only at the moment the viewer assumes the position of the model. According to Foucault, the gaze of the painter, peering out from behind his canvas, simultaneously greets and dismisses us as we alternate between being his subject and being “replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself.”13 The gaze of the painter both sees us—each individual viewer in all of his or her exacting specificity—and does not see us, stares right through us, preoccupied as he is with his model. The viewer is both seen and invisible at the same time. Close, but not quite, says Svetlana Alpers. Las Meninas, she claims, is not so much concerned with this play of reciprocal absence and presence, as it is with picturing two conflicting modes of classical representation. The first is an Albertian, perspectival view onto the world, where the artist and the viewer share the same position, in front of the picture plane as though looking through a window. The second, the camera obscura view, is a mode of representation in which the image of the world is cast by itself, independent of the viewing subject. In the window mode of representation, vision is a physiological process, in which a biological lens focuses a projected image onto the viewer’s retina. In the camera obscura

13. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 4.

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mode of representation, vision is a physical process, in which a mechanical lens or aperture projects an image into a darkened, enclosed space. Radically reconstituting vision outside of the subject, the camera obscura view presents us with an image of the world that is capable of seeing itself. For Alpers it is more than just the painter who greets and dismisses us in Las Meninas—it is the world itself.14 Both forms of representation Alpers identifies in Las Meninas exemplify and shore up the classical division between the viewing subject (res cogitans) and the world (res extensa) that it represents. Both the perspectival view through the window and in the projected image of the camera obscura are predicated on a monocular paradigm of vision. Neither view can account for the intervention of the viewer’s body in the act of perception—neither can conceive of binocularity or of specific sensory nerve functions as fundamental to the viewing process. Indeed in both modes of representation, all forms of physiological interference are eliminated such that viewer’s vision of the world appears to flow seamlessly through the eye and into the mind. The interiority of vision is stabilized, and, along with it, the external world that it represents. For all its complexity, and for all the contestation over its various views, Las Meninas presents us with a model of vision that one assumes—that one steps into—as already formed. In Las Meninas we snap, abruptly, into the position of the viewer, understanding all along that we are assuming a visual role that preceded us. Despite all of its recondite visual positioning, we do not have to learn how to see Las Meninas. In the view from Delaunay’s Window we can see the signs of both forms of representation Alpers describes in Las Meninas, even as Delaunay programmatically frustrates them. This is particularly evident in the painted frame that is at once asserted and negated. For Alpers the essential difference between the window and camera obscura view hinges exactly on the necessity, or the lack thereof, of the frame: the window view frames the world, whereas in the camera obscura view “the world produces its own view without a necessary frame.”15 Delaunay asserts and negates the frame most obviously through painting it—dissolving it—into the composition. The frame of Delaunay’s Window does not frame a view in the manner of a literal window—we can, after all, see the building front in the lower part of the frame, as though the frame were as transparent as the view it stakes out. At the same time, however, the dark void between the outer edge of the canvas and the inner edge of the frame makes itself felt in no uncertain terms. The frame delimits the view from the window and, at the same time, is integrated into the composition as though it were within the view it establishes. This double reinforcement and dissolution of the frame is also evident in how the compositional grid patterns both assert and deny the distinction between

14. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas,” in Representations 1 (Berkeley: University of California, 1983). I thank Hal Foster for prompting me to think about Delaunay’s painting in relation to classical representation. My thinking here is very much indebted to Foster’s own lines of inquiry. 15. Ibid., p. 37.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826461 by guest on 01 October 2021 Delaunay. Window with Orange Curtains. 1912. © L and M Services B.V., Amsterdam 20020816. the frame and the canvas. At times Delaunay carefully establishes the line of a grid along the exact edge of the frame (as in the bottom half of the left side of the frame), while at other times he willfully contravenes the boundary of the frame (as in the dark plum-colored rectangle that cuts across the view of the face). Indeed, the composition itself seems to be formed by frames within frames that never seem to quite establish themselves. Frames form and dissolve, only to form and dissolve again.16 The simultaneous affirmation and negation of the window and camera obscura views is further evident in what first appears to be another form of framing—the curved orange break in color that we see in the upper part of the painted frame. It makes the most immediate sense to see this framing as a break in two curtains, through which we can see the tower and its surrounding sky. Delaunay seems to be deliberately pointing us in this direction by alluding to another, now lost painting in the series, Window with Orange Curtains. Indeed, it seems that we are again asked to combine what we see with what we remember. And yet, at the same time, we cannot help but be struck by how closely the blue space between the curtains mirrors the shape of the tower. The

16. That Delaunay was aware of the camera obscura and the window as discrete modes of representation, and that he worked to blur the boundaries between them, is testiﬁed to in Blaise Cendrars’s account of Delaunay’s working method: “This is how Delaunay worked: He shut himself in a darkened room where he nailed the shutters closed. Having prepared his canvas and ground his colors, he

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longer we look, the more the negative space of the sky flips into the positive space of a second image of the tower—a second tower that appears reflected, impossibly, on the surface of the window. It is as though the tower were seeing itself, reflected back on the other side of the window. And in seeing this impossible reflection, it is as if we too were also suddenly seeing from the other side of the window—as though we were suddenly thrust into the heart of the scene we are looking at. Impossible, perhaps, but not without a certain logic. For it is precisely this representational logic that constitutes the camera obscura view: that the world forms its own image, independent of the viewing subject, and that the viewing subject is located within the image of the world, not before it. We move unstably, therefore, from an image of the world that we stand before, framed by the orange curtains, and an image of the world that we are within, an image that casts itself onto the surface of the painting independent of the viewing subject. It is crucial that we return, in the end, to the view from above. For while Delaunay complicates the line that runs between the two poles of lateral vision—between the subject that looks out, laterally, onto the world, and the world that projects its image back, in the opposite direction, toward the subject—he gives us another angle onto the world, an angle that intersects classical vision at mid-point, straight down from above. It is from this overhead position that Delaunay is able to resolve what Alpers sees as the central representational contradiction in Las Meninas, the “unresolvable” means by which a single image compounds two discrete and irreconcilable representational forms. Las Meninas, for Alpers, presents two distinct views onto the world that refuse to accommodate one another. The two poles of classical vision—the subject and the world—are thrust together, each struggling to assert its will over the other, each demanding priority over its counterpart. Velázquez, Alpers writes, “holds in suspension two contradictory . . . modes of picturing the relationship of the viewer, and picture, to the world. One assumes the priority of a viewer before the picture who is the measure of the world, and the other assumes that the world is prior to any human presence and is thus essentially immeasurable.”17 The viewer and world vie for a position of dominance as two mutually exclusive points of view. “Seen or seeing?”—this is the question that for Alpers, no less than for Foucault, Las Meninas asks insistently and without end.

drilled a small hole in the shutters. A ray of sunlight filtered into the room and he began to paint it, to study it, to take it apart, to analyze it in all its elements of form and color. . . . Then he enlarged the hole a little and began to paint the play of colors. . . . Soon the hole that he had drilled in the shutters became so large that Delaunay opened the shutter doors and allowed the full light of day to enter his room” (Blaise Cendrars, “La Tour Eiffel,” Aujourd’hui 1917–1929, suivi de Essais et réflexions 1910–1916 [Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1987], pp. 77–78). As Cendrars describes, Delaunay’s concern is neither exclusively the camera obscura nor the window, but the intermediary stages between. Once the aperture reaches a certain size, the camera obscura and the window are both simultaneously affirmed and negated. 17. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas,” p 39.

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Delaunay’s view down onto the tower resolves this contradiction, this apparent incommensurability between seeing and being seen. “The Tower,” as Barthes writes, “transgresses this separation, this habitual divorce of seeing and being seen; it achieves a sovereign circulation between the two functions; it is a complete object that has, if one may say so, both sexes of sight.”18 Like Barthes, Delaunay presents us with a view of the tower that serves as both an image of seeing, and an image of the structure of seeing. For in learning to make sense of Delaunay’s Window, we are thrust into the folds of a visual sensibility that is constructed as much by how we see as what we see. We learn to make sense of Delaunay’s Window as our common sense engages our visual sense, and in so doing we learn anew a visual process that we have forgotten ever having learned.

18. Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” p. 238.

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