Delaunay's Flying Discs

By ROBERT HUGHES

For most of the 35 years since he died of cancer in 1941, Robert Delaunay has been an anomaly, slightly blurred in silhouette--the Cubist Who Wasn't. He painted the Eiffel Tower over and over again. He made a series of compositions based on brightly banded circles, one of which--The First Disc, 1912--is almost certainly the first abstract picture painted in France by a Frenchman. Born in 1885, a few years after Braque and Picasso, he tended to be conventionally pigeonholed by art historians as one of their more gifted epigones. And yet, as one can plainly see from the 140-odd paintings, drawings, prints and reliefs that make up the exhilarating Delaunay retrospective organized by French Art Historian Michel Hoog at the Orangerie in Paris this summer, the man belonged to no movement. His rainbow-hued paintings shared very little with cubism. "But they're painting with cobwebs!" was his reaction to the sober, niggling brown-and-gray facets of the first cubist pictures he saw. The tenor of Delaunay's imagination was different: coarser, more exuberant. In a crucial sense, it was more modern as well.

Archaeology of Newness. To understand Delaunay's modernity one has to realize how old-fashioned the subject matter of cubism was. Picasso or Braque's still lifes, with their tilted cafe tables, guitars, fruit and playing cards, were scarcely different as subjects from those of Caravaggio or Chardin. Despite a few contemporary intrusions (newspaper headlines, printed tickets, linoleum), the subjects of cubism were classical, traditional. They ignored the technology, whose scale, speed, ingenuity and arrogant newness so captivated poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Marinetti and Blaise Cendrars, or painters like Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia --and Delaunay. The machine culture extolled by these early modernists of the Belle Epoque is our own archaeology, but we cannot revive the mixture of innocent awe and millenarian hope with which they confronted it. Like the faith that raised Chartres, that has gone.

Its most imposing symbol was the Eiffel Tower, erected when Robert Delaunay was four years old: now a venerable cliche of tourism, but to Parisians then the tallest structure on earth and a cathedral of modernity. "The Eiffel Tower is my fruit-dish," Delaunay liked to say, in a dig at cubist still life. From 1909 onward, he painted it at least 30 times: close up or on the skyline, seen from above or below, aggressively sharp or half-dissolved in mists of color, broken, dislocated, twisting upward, a veritable Tower of Babel. No painter had dealt with this emblem of Promethean man before, and it is not surprising that some of Delaunay's images of it--especially the Red Eiffel Tower, 1911-12 (see color)--were tinged with anthropomorphism: a red, two-legged form, trusses and girders, ramping about like Zarathustra.

There were other emblems of modernity too. The birch-and-canvas aircraft that look to us like trembling old dragonflies but were the Concordes of their time seldom became a painter's subject: Delaunay made them so with Homage to Bleriot, 1913-14. It is a marvelously aerated image of flight. The painted discs that had become his signature function variously as wheels, radial engines, sunbursts and air force roundels; a red propeller flaps, and a biplane hangs like an angel in a mandorla of color. No athlete himself, Delaunay was fascinated by organized spectator sport--itself a "modern" phenomenon. Its sense of disciplined energy appealed to him, and in the various versions of The Cardiff Team, he set forth a compendium of favorite images: the box-kite biplane in the sky, the Tower, a Ferris wheel, a bright yellow bill board for an aircraft-manufacturing firm named Astra and the joyously leaping rugby players.

The link between this world of phys ical prowess and Delaunay's abstract disc-paintings was light. The filament bulb was just beginning to transform the appearance of Paris, and artificial light fascinated Delaunay. His earlier paintings, done under the influence of Seurat and the pointillists, contained sun discs rendered in thick dabs of pure color. A recurrent image in the poetry of the pre war avantgarde, especially in Apollinaire's, was of a world revived, bathed, transformed by natural and artificial light. That was the essential subject of Delaunay's disc-paintings. An eye used to the targets and stripes of painting in the 1960s might seize on Delaunay's First Disc as a prophecy. But Delaunay's image was meant to be cosmic, its intentions mystical, and with its luminous feathery hues, First Disc radiates a subtle intensity of feeling that its descendants cannot claim.

Harmonious Balance. Born and raised in Paris, the son of a well-off engineer, Delaunay was not afflicted by the poverty that befell most of his fellow artists. He gave all his time to painting. From that aspect, he was lucky in marriage too. His Russian-born wife, Sonia Terk (whom Delaunay met in 1909), was a gifted artist, and they worked out an unusually harmonious balance between their talents. After staying a few weeks with the young couple in 1912, Apollinaire sighed that "The Delaunays start talking art as soon as they wake up." In his worse moments, Delaunay was a crashing bore, capable of emptying a room with his theoretical diatribes. He cannot have been easy to live with. "An artist can never be egoceritric enough," he liked to announce. He was, to the last, an only child.

The 1914 war caught the Delaunays unawares; they were in Portugal, and they stayed there and in Spain until 1920. In so doing Delaunay missed the horrors of the front, as Leger, Braque and Apollinaire did not. But for some reason his painting, after he got back to Paris, was never quite to regain the life-affirming energy of his prewar work.

There is something undeniably stodgy and programmatic about his abstractions from the late '20s and '30s; they suffer from the earnestly Utopian look of most geometrical abstract painting in France between the wars. Many of them are scarcely better than sophisticated Art Decoornament. From then on his wife became the stronger half of the creative partnership. But his precocious early work remains extraordinary, even six decades later: an embodiment in paint of Paris' traditional nickname, La Ville Lumiere.

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