KU Leuven Faculty of Arts Blijde Inkomststraat 21 box 3301 3000 LEUVEN, BELGIË
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911-‐1923) Robert Delaunay
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Delaunay’s red shattered tower ABSTRACT The following paper examines the work of Robert Delaunay, his painting Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911-‐1923) and the Eiffel Tower series. It assesses the importance of the painter’s ideas and techniques in Modern Art trough an intertextual analysis that encompasses writings from Delaunay himself and further reports about his work. This paper endeavours to answer how big was the influence of Delaunay and his depiction of the Eiffel Tower among the European art around the second decade of the twentieth century, and to examine if concepts like depth, rhythm and simultaneity were deliberated presented as an alternative and sort of ‘mystic’ manner of connecting spectators and paintings. This analysis concludes that Delaunay had great influence among poets and painters, promoted the Eiffel Tower as a motif and, in his search for light, introduced significant basis to abstract painting.
Juan David Montoya Alzate Professor Hedwig Schwall Art, Literature and Religion of Europe 4 January 2014
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Delaunay’s red shattered tower “…all this night, too, it will be there, connecting me above Paris to each of my friends that I know are seeing it.” (Barthes 1997: 3) There is no major or more popular icon of Modernity—perhaps neither a most prominent object related to Modern Art—than the one that the Eiffel Tower represents. It has become a synonym of Paris, and somehow a synonym of art and painting as well. The following lines endeavours to throw some light in assessing the significance of Robert Delaunay’s depiction of the Eiffel Tower, particularly in Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911-‐1923), and its relation to the concepts of movement, rhythm and depth, introduced by the artist. It is at the core of this paper to evidence how some aesthetic researches undertaken by Delaunay gave rise to a new kind of painting representation that could be underpinned in the field of Abstract Art. Being a talented and wealthy painter at the dawn of the twentieth in Paris was certainly a great opportunity. Nourished by all trends making a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, born in 1885, Delaunay was from a very young age embedded in an artistic
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and enlightening milieu. Thus placing Delaunay in History is witnessing an artistic revolution at its very epicentre: Paris. In the same way, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower was created during crucial years for contemporary art. Rudenstine (1976: 101) has shown that this painting was exhibited unfinished in 1912 at the Galerie Barbazanges, in Paris. The final result that now rests in the Art Institute of Chicago was not achieved until 1923, since leaving incomplete works and later repainting on them was usual for Delaunay. Shattered planes of light surrounding the iron structure were added later, Drutt argues (1997: 33). This feature means that the painting displays all Delaunay’s evolutions in technique that he developed throughout the second decade of the century, while remaining authentic to his early Eiffel Tower series (1909-‐1912). About this work, Delaunay commented on 1939: “I sought points of view juxtaposed from different perspectives. It was a desire to search out a total form that I had not yet succeeded in discovering, because I was at that moment straddling the fence between what we call transitional painting—traditional, rather—and the new reality.” (Delaunay 1978: 155) Champs de Mars: The Red Tower is one of the best-‐known paintings among the whole Eiffel Tower series because it sums up; it serves as a link between Cubist use of form and latter
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achievements in Delaunay’s use of pure colour, his main goal after 1912 when he committed to favour harmony instead of volume. On one hand, the tower structure is evidently attached to the cubist aesthetic; its surroundings, on the other, cast the use of simultaneity of colour that would mark the Windows series and most of his Circular Forms works. According to Chipp, the Eiffel Tower series achieved to melt somehow the fragmented physical object with the space while giving a new use to Post-‐Impressionist colour techniques: “In some of the Eiffel Tower series, he begins to employ color that is as dynamic as the form, in fragmented areas and strong contrasts of vermilion, orange, yellow, and green. With this series he begins to combine the coloristic tradition of Neoimpressionism with the formal structures of Cubism.” (Chipp 1958) Deconstructing the tower Delaunay worked on the Tower motif all his life. After the first series around 1910 the artist painted two more in the 20’s and later on the 30’s. These late series, however, did not get the success that the first one achieved. It is noteworthy how these paintings promoted the tower as a symbol. Jean Seurat and Le Douanier Rousseau had worked on the Eiffel Tower before, but according to Drutt (1997) it was not until the 20’s that it became the great muse we now recognize. Actually, when Delaunay started taking it as an inspiration on 1909 it was, in fact, at
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risk to be demolished. Being erected in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was not the great motif for Impressionists, despite the touristic cliché and some postcards suggest the opposite. Some critics claim none of other Delaunay’s works had the notoriety that the Eiffel Tower accomplished, and certainly the European world art welcomed his interpretation around 100 years ago. Between 1910 and 1911, paintings and even pencil studies were exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants (Paris), the Blaue Reiter exhibition (Munich) and Les Indépendants exposition (Brussels). Regarding how the series promoted the Eiffel Tower symbolic value, one curious detail is that Robert Delaunay started working on this motif as a sort of gift to Sonia Terk, with whom he married in 1909. Perhaps they were pioneers in relating the Eiffel Tower with love. According to Sonia herself: “It was our picture. The Eiffel Tower and the Universe were one and the same to him” (Cited in Vriesen 1992). Before going any further on Champs de Mars: The Red Tower it is essential to make clear that this painting could hardly be grasped in an isolated field: it must be underpin in the whole Eiffel Tower series. In perspective, looking at the tower structure in this series is witnessing a gradual process of deconstruction while experimenting with line and colour. Looking chronologically at the series, the spectator is able to perceive the cubist procedure of fracturing the space going forward; flattening the object and fading it in the background, the foreground and, in the end, vanishing away in bouncing glass reflections (Windows).
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It is worth highlighting that Delaunay introduced a new perspective in this achievement originally revealed by Cubists. In further works on the Eiffel Tower, he even introduced aerial viewpoints. This is how Chipp described one painting of the series: “…this interpenetration of tangible objects and surrounding space is accompanied by an intense movement of the geometric planes that is more active than the static equilibrium of Cubist forms, and yet it conforms more to the pictorial structure of the picture than the somewhat cinematographic movements of Futurism.” (Chipp 1958) Although the Eiffel Tower is the main object in the series named after it, the French ‘Iron Lady’ is also relevant in other series by Delaunay, such as The City and Windows. The latter is perhaps the most experimental of them, in which the artist extremely diverges from Cubist representation as he gets closer to his idea of light use. In this perspective, we could thus establish that the Eiffel Tower was an object put into a process of artistic experimentation and deconstruction, suggesting modernity in an urban context. According to Virginia Spate, Orphists—and especially Delaunay—were in fact attempting to intuitively translate Modernity trough a new pictorial language:
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“The modern world was of such complexity that it could not be embodied in structures which show finite objects in one moment in time and they tried (…) to express the mind’s simultaneous grasp of an infinite number of objects, thoughts, sensations and states of mind.” (Spate 1994:90) For Delaunay, the aim of conveying the chaos in modernity was not left to chance though. Smoke like swirly clouds, uneven buildings and disarray surround the collapsing tower in Champs de Mars: The Red Tower. The whole series was described by him as "visions of catastrophic insight . . . ; cosmic shakings, desire for the great cleanup, for burying the old, the past . . . Europe crumbles. Breath of madness (Futurism before theory): dislocation of the successive object" (Delaunay, cited in Drutt 1997: 30). This view is not just the depiction of modern rush and commotion before the Great War; it is certainly a call for the arrival of a new kind of representation that would liberate art from academicism. Moreover, Delaunay severely condemned pre-‐modern painting, since he thought in all schools predominated chiaroscuro almost as the only possible way of representation. In his search for light, he defined Impressionism and Cézanne’s work as the birth of valuable painting. Furthermore, depicting Modernity and producing a disruption with Pre-‐Impressionist painting was not his highest ambition, Hughes says (2002 and 2007.) He argues that all signs in
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First Disk and his early series—including Saint-‐Séverin and the Eiffel Tower series—suggest that the artist was actually seeking a new way of perception; that Delaunay’s aim was teaching not only to see images but vision itself: “His work stands in response not simply to an altered mode of seeing wrought by modernity but to a historical change in the actual understanding of perception—a change, that is, in the understanding of the internal, physiological mechanics of perception.” (Hughes 2007: 309) Orphist perception In order to pull these new “mechanics” Delaunay embraced a technique that he equated to crafts, not science nor classical art concepts. Detaching it from geometry, this practice allowed shifting his works to the state of “pure painting” and liberating art from mimesis. In ‘Light,’ published in 1913 (Delaunay 1997a), the artist introduced pioneering concepts like color rhythm, movement, simultaneity, depth and harmony that earned him a reputation of a mystic artist. After Champs de Mars: The Red Tower was exhibited on 1912, some of these concepts were successfully applied in the patches around the red tower during the stage of finishing the painting. Was this mystic reputation around Delaunay unfounded? Claiming purity on his paintings and “that the circular generation of light was the fundamental principle of all beings” (Spate
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1994:91,) Delaunay approached his work to some of the ideas proposed by Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, originally published in 1910. Colours, Kandinsky said, “produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance” (2002). Regarding Apollinaire’s observations rising comments about esoteric meanings behind his paintings, Delaunay remarked: "His reflections lead neither to mathematical formulae nor to Cabalistic symbols. They guide him simply and naturally toward pictorial realities: colors and lines” (Delaunay 1978: 117). In other words, the painter replied he was just following an artistic path, like a craftsman does, and rejected further interpretations. Concepts like rhythm, simultaneity, movement and depth were nothing but the nature Delaunay sensed and consequently conveyed in a pictorial way. It is inspiring, however, to think about these correspondences between painting and other fields, triggering synaesthesia. “He and painter/musician Paul Klee incorporated musical terms and concerns with the temporality of music, duration and intervals, in the spatial composition of their paintings,” Armstrong (2009) says. What is more, Delaunay kept developing quite straight motifs inspired by music, as seen in late works such as Endless Rhythm (1934). All these free interpretations, Spate argues, anticipated an emotive approach to future abstract art.
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“Despite their inconsistencies, the Orphists grasped the raison d'être of abstract art: for the artist, confirmation of his or her being through the act of painting; for the spectator, consciousness through the self-‐forgetting, yet self-‐aware absorption of the ‘otherness’ of the painting.” (Spate 1994: 95) In this sense, it is not irrational to relate Delaunay’s paintings with mantras, music, the Kabbalah, mandalic symbols or literature. As seen before, the series had great influence in those poets living in Paris around 1910. “I was in the period of transition toward something else and from the point of view of poetry, from the lyric point of view, this had a definite influence on the poetry of the era,” said Delaunay (1978: 154). Nonetheless, the colourful notion of Paris conveyed by him could easily be traced trough some later works of the Lost Generation in the 20’s or Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch in the 60’s, which by the way shows Paris as a sort of ‘Orphic’ city full of circular labyrinths. This flexibility allowed Delaunay’s work to become a keystone for the Blaue Reiter group, German Expressionism, and later abstract movements in painting. It also became a great influence, to name a few, for designers, poets and photographers throughout the entire twentieth century.
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Conclusions The Eiffel Tower series and, particularly Champs de Mars: The Red Tower, caused great impact in the ‘Art World’ from the moment Robert Delaunay presented these paintings in 1911. It meant a step forward in the artist’s search for light, and it gave him a motif in which the French painter would work the rest of his life. Demonstrating his object was a great source of beauty, Delaunay fostered the Eiffel Tower as a classical motif in Modern Art, thus promoting the structure as an icon of Paris, France, and Art in general. This impact could be measured in painting, but in literature, cinematography and other fields as well. The work, furthermore, was created in crucial times for Modern Art—times indelibly marked with Cubism—in which the painters endeavoured to explain chaos, rush, Modernity. However, the motivations behind the Eiffel Tower series were diverse: they had to do with a personal search for light and a new language in painting, disregarding academic and classical concepts, suggesting new capabilities of sight and striving to deal with line, viewpoints, and above all, with colour. Doing this, Delaunay found his own artistic sight, one that would make him go away from Cubist expression. In this context Champs de Mars: The Red Tower has become a nodal painting, since it marked the use of a deconstructed object along with colour simultaneity, technique present in Delaunay’s later works such as Hommage à Blériot (1914) and Circular Forms.
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Finally, Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower series anticipated a great shift in painting produced in the twentieth century. That is the foundation of a non-‐figurative expression, supporting an emotive contact with Art that allows and encourages multiple interpretations and approaches.
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Works cited
Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Print. Cendrars, Blaise. “Tower.” Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997. 132. Print. Chipp, Herschel B. “Orphism and Color Theory.” The Art Bulletin 40, no. 1 (March 1, 1958): 55–63. Web [Accessed on December 7, 2013]. Delaunay, Robert. “Letter to Franz Marc”. Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997b. P. 129. Print. -‐-‐-‐“Light.” Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997a. P. 126-‐127. Print. -‐-‐-‐The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. The Documents of 20th-‐Century Art. New York: Viking Press, 1978. Print. Drutt, Matthew. “Simultaneous Expressions: Robert Delaunay’s Early Series.” In Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997. 19-‐13. Print.
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Gordon Hughes.“Coming into Sight: Seeing Robert Delaunay’s Structure of Vision.” The MIT Press. October 102 (October 1, 2002): 87–100. Web [Accessed on December 15, 2013]. -‐-‐-‐“Envisioning Abstraction: The Simultaneity of Robert Delaunay’s ‘First Disk.’” The Art Bulletin 89, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 306–332. Web [Accessed on December 7, 2013] doi:10.2307/25067319. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Project Gutenberg, 2002. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5321/pg5321.html [Accesed on January 4 2014]. Rosenthal, Mark. “Introduction.” Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series. Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997. 11-‐13. Print. Rudenstine, Ángelica Z. The Guggenheim Museum Collection: Paintings. Vol 2. New York: Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 1976. Print. Spate, Virginia. “Orphism.” Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism. 3rd ed., expanded and updated. World of Art. New York, N.Y: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Print. Vriesen, Gustav. Robert Delaunay: Licht und Farbe des Orphismus. Cologne: DuMont, 1992. Print.