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

By Gordon Hughes

Robert Delaunay was one of the leading artists working in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and his paintings have been admired ever since as among the earliest purely abstract works.

With Resisting Abstraction, the first English-language study of Delaunay in more than thirty years, Gordon Hughes mounts a powerful argument that Delaunay was not only one of the earliest artists to tackle abstraction, but the only artist to present his abstraction as a response to new scientific theories of vision. The colorful, optically driven canvases that Delaunay produced, Hughes shows, set him apart from the more ethereal abstraction of contemporaries like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and František Kupka. In fact, Delaunay emphatically rejected the spiritual motivations and idealism of that group, rooting his work instead in contemporary science and optics. Thus he set the stage not only for the modern artists who would follow, but for the critics who celebrated them as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9780226159232

Book preview

Gordon Hughes is Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History at Rice University, editor of Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War One, and coeditor of October Files: Richard Serra.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in China

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15906-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15923-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226159232.001.0001

Publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Gordon, 1965– author.

Resisting abstraction : Robert Delaunay and vision in the face of modernism / Gordon Hughes.

       pages    cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-15906-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-15923-2 (e-book)

1. Painting, French. 2. Delaunay, Robert, 1885–1941. I. Title.

ND553.D357H84 2014

759.4—dc23

2013050779

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism

Gordon Hughes

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To my mother, Diana Grace Hughes

Contents

Introduction

1. BREAK (WINDOWS)

2. PUNCH (PAINTING)

3. MOVEMENT (INTO ABSTRACTION)

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

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

Introduction

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

After a time, the neglected corner of the collectors’ apartment in Lawler’s photographs begins to feel more and more like a neglected corner of history. Not that the importance of the Disk has ever been seriously called into question, but such obdurate abstraction at such an early date has never been easy to make sense of. I was taken for a lunatic, recalls Delaunay, with an uneasy mix of bitterness and pride.² In fairness, though, he must have anticipated this bewilderment; there was little by way of precedent for abstraction in 1913, and certainly nothing of this order. But this mystification has continued more or less unabated in the hundred or so years since. Take Alfred Barr’s 1936 spiderweb chart of modern art (figure 0.4). In the double prongs of its tangled teleologies, only Orphism—Apollinaire’s misbegotten term and attempt to unite the disparate abstract tendencies of Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia—goes exactly nowhere. That the diagrammatic arrow leading from cubism to Orphism ends in what Barr sees as the only cul-de-sac in twentieth-century art is all the more surprising given that the relation between cubism and abstract art was the ostensible motive for his flowchart. Important enough to warrant mapping, Orphism’s significance is nonetheless unclear within the logic of Barr’s schema. For importance, as conceived by Barr, is clearly determined by flow; from movement to movement, one into the next, twentieth-century modernism progresses smoothly and logically down into the twin funnels of geometrical and nongeometrical abstract art. Everything leads to something else. Everything, that is, but Orphism, which just sits there, an apparent clog in the pipes. Yet this is a clog that cannot be cleanly removed or ignored; the early abstraction of Delaunay in particular is too significant—too much of a radical first—to be left off the chart. Despite its lack of flow—despite the fact that it goes nowhere—Orphism is important. It’s just not clear why.

0.2. Louise Lawler, (Stevie Wonder) Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City, 1984. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

0.3. Adam Bartos, photograph of the Tremaine apartment, House and Garden, April 1984. Courtesy of Adam Bartos.

0.4. Alfred H. Barr, cover of the exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Part of the problem, of course, is the lack of fit among the artists assembled under the Orphic umbrella. All had undergone their artistic formation within cubism, and all shared a tendency toward abstraction when they broke with cubism in 1912. Beyond that, they had little of substance in common. The divergent nature of those muscled into Orphism is apparent in the very fact that most of these artists did slide into various channels of modernist flow: arrows can be drawn from Duchamp and Picabia to Dada and surrealism and from Léger to the postwar machine aesthetic of purism. In part it is these disparate directions that prevent Orphism from flowing as it should. The real problem, however, is Delaunay. For though the art historical tracks of influence have long been laid for the majority of those who passed through Orphism, Delaunay and his Disk present twentieth-century modernism with a stubborn radicality that it doesn’t quite know what to do with. While others moved on, Delaunay was left, more ebb than flow, to clog things up.

If Barr’s chart stands out as the first art historical account to find itself at a loss when dealing with Delaunay’s abstraction, it wasn’t to be the last. More recently Yve-Alain Bois has acknowledged the stature of Delaunay’s Disk while simultaneously proclaiming it a fluke.³ Thierry de Duve has similarly described the Disk as a moment of surprise that was without epistemological consequences.⁴ Most surprising, perhaps, is the near-total exclusion of Delaunay from Clement Greenberg’s writing. In one of his few references to Delaunay, Greenberg writes, Abstract art itself may have been born amid the painterliness of Analytical Cubism, Léger, Delaunay, and Kandinsky.⁵ Yet unlike the other progenitors on the list, Delaunay appears only once in Greenberg’s collected writings, for a total of two paragraphs, in a 1949 exhibition review. Describing Delaunay as an enterprising painter whose influence is perhaps more important than his art, fine as it is, Greenberg, like art history in general, ascribes an influence to Delaunay that is duly noted but never substantiated.⁶

Looking more at home in the second half of the twentieth century than the early part of the first, the Disk bears a striking and often remarked resemblance to, for example, Jasper John’s targets, Kenneth Noland’s circle paintings, or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases (figure 0.5). And yet, surprisingly, the Disk has not been particularly well served by its anachronistic look. Rather than reaping the rewards of being ahead of its time—that avant-garde virtue par excellence, one would have thought—the Disk, with its by-our-eyes contemporary appearance, instead fueled a long-held belief, now known to be erroneous, that Delaunay did not exhibit the Disk publically until 1922 at the Galerie Paul Guillaume. The implication being, of course, that once abstraction had entered the realm of respectability, Delaunay attempted to repackage a private studio experiment never intended for exhibition as a finished tableau. Hence Pierre Francastel’s remark in his introduction to the 1957 catalogue raisonné that "isolated, the Disk only constitutes an étude."⁷ Far from keeping it under wraps, however, Delaunay displayed The First Disk with apparent eagerness, a month or so after it was painted, at the 1913 Herbstsalon in Berlin.⁸ Omitted from the catalog through a series of miscommunications with Herwarth Walden, the exhibition’s organizer, its exhibition was in turn omitted, until recently, from the historical record. Following the Herbstsalon, it is likely that Delaunay went on to include the Disk at the 1914 Mánes group exhibition in Prague.⁹ One need only look at August Macke’s Farbenkreis II (groß) (figure 0.6) to see the impression it made on those who saw it.¹⁰

0.5. Frank Stella, Sinjerli II, 1967. Polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas, 3 meters diameter. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. Brooks Barron. Photo: Nemo Warr. © 2014 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The complexities of the Disk’s exhibition record aside, the single greatest obstacle to a sustained and substantive accounting of Delaunay’s postcubist painting has been its stubborn resistance to default narratives of early abstraction as spiritually motivated. Early progenitors of abstraction, the standard story goes, reject appearance not as a means of breaking with realism but as a means of penetrating deeper and deeper into an unseen reality that escapes vision as such. Even Delaunay, according to Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, speaks of ‘tearing the veil,’ which folds him into a model of abstraction that aims to unveil a mystical beyond otherwise cloaked by surface appearance.¹¹ Delaunay, however, could hardly have been more explicit in his rejection of mysticism. What I want to say isn’t the least bit mystical, he wrote sternly to August Macke in 1912.¹² Or again: Clear, living, visual—not mystical, as he later described his relation to the French tradition.¹³ Through and through, Delaunay is as materialist a painter as they come. When he states his aspiration to déchirer le voile, he is not, as I understand him, claiming to reveal some unseen metaphysics beyond the veil of visible appearance. It is not the beyond of appearance so much as the beneath that interests Delaunay: moving below the representational content of what we see into its underlying perceptual structure. This is the core argument of this book: that Delaunay’s painting, from the Window series to The First Disk, constitutes a concerted, theoretically informed effort to represent not the appearance of vision—not what we see—but the physiological and cognitive process by which vision comes into sight—the underlying conditions that allow us to see as we do.

Much as modernist painting gradually sheds representational content for its underlying material structure, Delaunay gradually sheds the representational content of vision for its underlying optical structure. The trick, pulled off with such simple ingenuity it has gone otherwise unnoticed, is to have these two structures, painting and vision, overlap with as much homologous precision as possible. The material flatness of the picture plane thus coincides with the optical flatness of the retinal surface, as does the ambiguous left-to-right, top-to-bottom orientation of Disk vis-à-vis the inverted image as it appears in the eye. At the same time, the painting’s circular shape reflects the circularity of the optical cone (the circular radius of vision prior to peripheral distortion), while the purity of discrete optical data is reflected in the purity of Delaunay’s painted colors—colors that acquire sense not in relation to a transparent referential function but in relation to one another.

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

More than just the material structure of painting, however, it is the structure of the tableau—in the distinct sense of the term developed initially in eighteenth-century France, before its reconception in the 1860s—that is ultimately at stake for Delaunay. In this sense, Delaunay’s painting looks back as much as it looks forward. Of course, no art historian has examined the central importance of the tableau within modernist painting more exhaustively, more convincingly, than Michael Fried, and I should acknowledge my debt to his work up front. Fried’s analysis of the tableau’s two distinct orders and speeds of viewing—the initial visual impact (strikingness, Fried calls it) and a significantly slower form of seeing that sustains the viewer’s contemplative engagement—are especially important to my claims regarding Delaunay’s work. In addition, Delaunay’s paintings stage the viewer’s double position in relation to the tableau, as he or she both stands apart from and is visually immersed in the painting. This double positioning of the viewer, as directly facing the painting from a certain distance and as inhabiting pictorial space, is allegorized by Delaunay in various ways: through the visual conventions associated with the frame and the camera obscura, for example, and through aerial and street vision (examined in chapters 1 and 2, respectively). For Delaunay, salvaging vision in the face of modernism—in the face of what Martin Jay has influentially described as the twentieth century’s denigration of vision—requires moving all of these underlying structures—vision, painting, tableau—into the open, such that each aligns with its structural counterpart.

It is safe to say that one reason