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 Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 12 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 Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 12 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.