Word: delaunay
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...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...
...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...
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 Léger, Francis Picabia -and Delaunay...
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 Blériot, 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...
...Kupka exhibit starts at the top of the Guggenheim and spirals down through time, following the turns of "modern art." Kupka imitates or reflects dominant influences of his time: Matisse, Delaunay, Gross, Mondrian, Kay Nelson. But in looking at the works as a retrospective of the major aesthetic revolutions of our time, Kupka's theoretical contribution to those revolutions should not be ignored. Nor should his artistic (well, not genius, but) talent: his sensuous lyricism, keen sensitivity, and his occasional inspiration. Kupka is a mirror worth looking...