Resisting abstraction : Robert Delaunay and vision in the face of modernism

178 Pages·2014·23.21 MB·English

by  Delaunay

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Robert Delaunay and Vision
in the Face of Modernism
Gordon Hughes
University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
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).
To my mother, Diana Grace Hughes

Introduction 1
1 BReak (WInDoWs) 9
2 PuncH (PaInTInG) 59
3 MoVeMenT (InTo aBsTRacTIon) 95
conclusion 139
Acknowledgments 147
Notes 149
Index 167
0.1. Robert Delaunay, The First Disk, 1913. Oil on canvas, 134
cm diameter. Private collection.
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 paint-
ing 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
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