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Until 27th August, the city of Basel is hosting an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to French artist Robert Delaunay. Thanks to the curator Roland Wetzel, the Kunstmuseum of Basel has organized “Robert Delaunay: hommage à Blèriot,” an event that displays the eight compositions of the homonymous series, put together for the occasion with other masterpieces of Delaunay’s other series and with works of his contemporaries Vasilij Kandinskij, Fernand Lèger and futurist Luigi Russolo. Moreover, the Centre Pompidou of Paris has lent “Prismes èlectriques”, the painting that the artist’s wife, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, exposed at the Salon des indèpendants next to her husband’s “Homage à Blèriot”.
With his wife Sonia, and other early nineteenth-century art colossi like Vasilij Kandinskij, Kazimir Malevic, Paul Klee, Hans Arp and the futurists, Robert Delaunay launched the history of abstract art. After an initial adhesion to post-impressionism, filtered by the lesson of Paul Gauguin, George Seurat and the Fauves, he then approached the line of Paul Cèzanne and the cubist space.
The first years of the century revealed his interest for the dynamic breakdown of colour, reinterpreting analytical Cubism in abstract terms, combining the double research of movement and prismatic composition of colour. The pictorial results were chromatic permeation and simultaneity, according to a dynamism that recalls a certain futurist influence.
In this period, Delaunay passed from an interest in the rhythm of architecture to the theme of the Eiffel Tower and the Paris Church of Saint-Sèverin, where cubist breakdowns and very colourful circular shapes stand out in his works.
Although it was already twenty years old, the Eiffel Tower was for all artists a symbol of modernity and for Delaunay a “steel muse”. But in those revolutionary masterpieces other themes emerged: publicity, sport, free time and airplane journeys. Indeed, the French artist was rather fascinated by Blèriot, the first man who in 1909 crossed the English Channel, covering with his airplane a distance of about forty kilometres. For Delaunay this deed was the very essence of modernity. For this reason, between October 1913 and February 1914, he dedicated to Blèriot a new series of paintings, a synthesis of all the themes that he had explored in the previous cycles. When he completed the first canvas, he invited the aviator in his studio to show him it.
By combining figuration and abstraction, Delaunay had painted one of the most interesting works of the twentieth century, a firework that remains impressed in the eye of the beholder.
French poet Apollinaire labelled Delaunay’s abstract art as orphic cubism, to highlight the antithesis between this new creative vision and Picasso’s structural rigour. Apollinaire had recovered this term from ancient philosophy, referring to the dynamism produced by the contraposition of pure colours combined with the breaking down of shapes. A term that indicated the intimate musical nature of Delaunay’s works, in which colour breakdowns, with their effects of permeation, simultaneity, dynamism, acquire an autonomous value, which is independent of the objects represented.
But Robert Delaunay preferred to talk about pure painting rather than orphism, to emphasize the conceptual character of pictures that live on the interaction between light, space and movement. In his artistic research on simultaneity he reached results of fulminating effectiveness.
In 1914 Delaunay met great consensus in the art environment thanks to the exhibition of his “Hommage à Blèriot” at the Salon des indèpendants, the cradle of Paris for every historical avant-garde. It was a great success, which tempered the artist’s disappointment from the previous year, when his “Ville de Paris” was not accepted by the Armony Show in New York.
From that moment onwards Delaunay’s creative geniality started to decline, given that for a quarter of a century he continued painting pictures without even coming close the originality of his youth years.
(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)
From 27th April to 27th August 2008
ROBERT DELAUNAY: HOMMAGE À BLÈRIOT
At the Kunstmuseum of Basel
St. Alban Graben 16 – CH-4010 Basel
Tel. 0041612066262
Web: www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm. Closed on Monday.
Entrance: Full 12 CHF; Reduced 5 CHF.
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