Delaunay, Russell, Macdonald-Wright, Kupka, Picabia, Paris and Munich 1912
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Between Mondrian's strict economy and Kandinsky's ebullience there was room for some restraining, conciliatory element. This place was filled by Robert Delaunay for a short time, just long enough for him to leave a few works of incomparable beauty, by which I mean his Windows of 1912.
We are constantly reminded of that exceptional year, 1912. 1912 is increasingly recognized as the peak year of this century's painting, a year of transition in which everything was begun afresh although the old disciplines were neither consciously nor finally cast aside; a year from which the main tendencies of abstract art have radiated and to which we can always turn in our search for origins, for the seed of invention. One of the most valuable and fertile of these was the gay, fresh painting of Delaunay, who named his canvases after an expression of Eugène Chevreul, Simultaneous Contrasts.
Delaunay was born in Paris, in the rue de Chaillot, not far from the present Musée d'Art Moderne. He was the jovial type of Frenchman, or rather a typical Parisian, with a ready tongue and those quick blue eyes which seem to dwell on nothing but look straight through everything. He always spoke his mind without mincing words, while his round, pink face made him the picture of health. For him life meant happiness, a sensual, physical happiness and he approached painting in the same spirit. It was in 1908 or 1909 that he read Eugène Chevreul, the physicist's, theory of simultaneous colours which had already had such an influence on Seurat thirty years earlier. This confirmed the conclusions he had already reached intuitively. In the next few years his natural lyrical gifts found expression through the channel provided by these ideas. His main undertaking was in breaking down the prism and reassembling its elements on the canvas by a discreet though thorough division of surfaces. What Braque and Picasso did with a mandoline, fruit-dish or nude, Delaunay did with light itself, cutting it up and piecing it together again in a new way. This 'new way' implies personal research into the basic laws of painting. Apollinaire had already written "I like contemporary art because I love light more than anything: all men love light more than anything, having invented fire." Delaunay's work between 1911-1914 is a striking illustration of this thought. Like a child with its favorite toy he took the rainbow to pieces and improvised with the separate parts, but without ever going too far or betraying the rainbow's essence. He turned it into the very song of light, both airy and powerful.
Delaunay's works of that period are astonishing achievements. Form and idea are so closely united, the utterance so fused with the style, that in the forty years after him there was no painting capable of conveying such a sensation of physical joy, innocent serenity and strength combined -unless it be the painting of his wife, less candid and spiritually less spontaneous though it is.
In 1910 Delaunay married Sonia Terk, a Russian by birth, who was also a painter, and former wife of the German art-critic Wilhelm Uhde the discoverer of the 'Douanier' Rousseau. She gave him unfailing moral support and I have heard Delaunay say that but for her many a canvas would have remained unfinished. Delaunay was highly-strung, easily discouraged but just as easily stimulated to further effort.
Sonia Delaunay, whom Arthur Cravan so sharply but brillantly attacked in his pamphlet-review Maintenant is a remarkably gifted painter. Her large canvas Electric Prisms, painted in 1914 is one of the major works of that period. Like her husband she gave up abstract art while living in Portugal during the first World War. It was some years before they returned to pure painting; he in 1930 and she in 1937.
Much as Kandinsky set out from Fauvism and Mondrian from early synthetic Cubism ( 1912), Delaunay's abstract painting has its roots in Impressionism. The work of all three artists demonstrated well before 1914 that all forms of art are bound to move towards abstraction.
There were two American artists frequenting the same circles as Delaunay in 1911 and 1912. These were Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the former being of predominantly French extraction, and the latter, whose real name was Van Vranken, of Dutch parentage. They came to Paris in 1906 and 1907 respectively in order to study painting. Russell, who was the elder of the two, already has a good background as a painter, while Macdonald-Wright, less advanced technically, was trying to train himself through a scientific study of colour and reading -- like Delaunay -- the works of Eugèene Chevreul and other physicists. Shortly after making each other's acquaintance they began to feel sufficiently sure of themselves to launch a movement of their own and founded Synchronism. Synchromism was a departure from the Orphism led by Delaunay. The Synchromists were particularly active in 1913, In this one year they held a large exhibition in Munich, another at Bernheim Jeune's gallery in Paris, as well as sending canvases to the Salon des Indépendants and the Armory Show in New York which were both landmarks in the history of modern painting. But only one of their numerous works shown that year -- and it was one of Russell's -- can be regarded as abstract in the proper sense of the word: the other canvases are only secondary abstractions of subjects taken from nature, however advanced they might be. It was at this point that Russell's career really began, for at the Salon des Indépendants in the following year he showed his vast Synchromy in Form which, over thirty years later, was one of the key items in the exhibition of American abstract art held in the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1951.
Macdonald-Wright was not so quick to develop. The Synchromatic Piece in Orange-Yellow of 1915 and the Synchromy in Red of 1916 are undeniably abstract works, as was his Nude or Synchromy in Blue which was also painted in 1916. The Whitney Museum in New York owns one of his finest canvases, the Oriental Synchromy in Blue-green of 1918.
Morgan Russell and Macdonald-Wright are the real founders of American abstract art. They made a public and genuine profession of faith in abstract painting in the catalogue of their exhibition at Bernheim jeune's, but unfortunately they both gave up what they had so vigorously defended and returned to figurative art. This is mentioned as a matter of historical fact, and by no means in order to detract from their pioneer achievement.
Although they set out with the same principles these two Synchromist painters both managed to remain highly individual in their expression. The works they turned out during the 'heroic' period of their movement are historically very important for American culture and also show that they had very little influence on each other. Russell was the more temperamental painter of the two. His brushwork is thick and rich and his forms massive and violently set one against the other. His great composition of 1914(Synchromy in Form) has affinities with some of Picabia's works of the previous year, notably the famous Udnie and Edtaonisl which are of much the same dimensions as Russell's work. But Russell's canvas is more elemental, like some Cyclopean wall.
Macdonald-Wright is a little closer to Delaunay. His canvases are as rich in colour as the Parisian painter's, though far less luminous, while his treatment is less firm. He seeks blurred effects, with submerged outlines, while producing an unusual kind of transparency, with a suggestion of a floating haziness corrected by a few clear, free strokes which impose some kind of order on the composition as a whole. This is in contrast to Russell, who always stresses the underlying skeletal structure, with a characteristic emphasis and a vigour that threatens to overflow the too narrow framework he imposes on it.
At about the same time another American, Patrick Henry Bruce, showed a few works at the Salon des Indépendants which also had some relationship to Delaunay's Orphism and some of Picabia's canvases. I met him much later, in about 1930 in his gloomy flat in the Place de Furstenberg, where he showed me a few coolly coloured pieces which he seemed very worried about. He himself was dispirited and disinclined to talk, and yet his painting radiated happiness and reasonableness. He died a few years later after destroying a large number of his paintings. Nevertheless a number were saved by Henri-Pierre Roché.
Frank Kupka was born in Czecho-Slovakia and came to Paris in 1895, where he made his name as an illustrator ( The Erynnies, Lysistrata, Prometheus). He also painted portraits and a large Nude ( 1910) which is marvellously bright and fresh in its colouring. In 1911 he suddenly have up representational painting of nature, and in the 1912 Autumn Salon exhibited a Fugue in two colours and a Chromatique chaude which aroused much comment in the press. At the Salon des Indépendants in the following year he showed his Vertical Planes, Brown Line Solo, and at the Salon d'Automne his Localisations des Mobiles graphiques. After that he remained faithful to abstraction, except for the illustrations he made for the Song of Songs and a few other illustrated works which he published under a pseudonym.
We cannot consider Kupka's production since 1911 without our admiration being tinged with embarrassment, for his work seems to contain something of every style. This painter passes with disconcerting ease from the highly-coloured spherism of his Newton's Discs ( 1912) and their reminiscence of Delaunay, to a rectilinearism expressed in dull tones or a narrow range of colours ( Vertical Planes, 1912 or 1913). After that he indulges in baroque impressions or nagging reminiscences of the 'Modern style' which made a name for his friend and compatriot Alphonse Mucha, first in Paris in 1900 and afterwards in New York and Chicago. However a very careful selection would show Kupka to have produced a number of works of the first order, which could be classified in two groups: the dionysiac or, rather, orphic, as Apollinaire might have put it, in which the composition is held together by the curved line alone ( Study on a Red Ground, 1919; The Fair, 1921), and secondly those canvases in which only straight lines are used, with a marked preference for verticals, as in Blue and Red Vertical Planes, 1913, Blue in Planes of 1945, and Vibrant in Lines, 1948. In his most simplified works Kupka shows himself to be a romantic in his constant efforts to transcend painting through some literary preoccupation. In a word he is a kind of Gothic artist, either constructing solid but highly imaginative cathedral naves, or pouring out his exaltation in what might be called polyphonic paintings, evoking the lights of stained glass through their obsessional, echoing quality.
Picabia is even more disconcerting, for if Kupka went too far by trying to give everything at once, the Spanish painter has offered us a surfeit of both the worst and the best. In 1912 or 1913 he could be counted among the four or five best painters of his time, after which he blundered into every passing fashion so that the art to which he had contributed some undeniable masterpieces might easily have been misjudged as a phase in his careerism. His outstanding canvases were Procession in Seville,Udnie, Edtaonisl,Remembrance of my beloved Udnie, New York,The Spring,Dances by the Spring, Star Dancer and her School, all painted in 1912 or 1913. Picabia cannot be blamed, for after all no man can give more or other than what there is in him to give. It is no secret that he enjoyed the frills and smalltalk of social life, but that does not mean that he was not capable of brilliant demonstrations of wit in his painting. His machine-portraits are certainly examples of this, as well as his compositions with anti-aesthetic objects such as combs, sardine-tins and matches, which are in the best Dadaist spirit. His later productions however were not so successful. At Cannes, where he delighted in organizing the festivals, he returned to figurative painting for a number of years, much of it of a disappointing level. It was only in 1945 that Picabia was moved, like many others, by the postliberation revival and began to paint in the spirit of the age. His natural reaction was to return to abstract art, while still continuing to run it down, producing a series of very personal canvases which were somewhat aggressive in colour and in every case full of surprises in their composition (First seek your Orpheus,Awareness of Misery,Black Eye,The Third Sex, all of which belong to 1948). Then in 1949 he made a series of pictures consisting of nothing but dots, which are surely among the oddest works that have been produced in abstract art. I admit that I greatly enjoyed them when they were being painted, and was responsible for encouraging Picabia to produce so many of them.
While Delaunay, Kupka, Picabia, Mondrian and others made Paris the capital of abstract art, Kandinsky was working on his own in Munich. Despite his efforts to attract, round his Blue Horseman, all the best talents he knew of in the world of art, the fact remains that his own were the only genuinely abstract works in the exhibitions of the famous group in the course of 1912. While Franz Marc and August Macke, his young German colleagues, painted a few completely abstract canvases in 1913 or 1914, they were not recognized until much later, after both these outstanding representitives of their generation in Germany had lost their lives in the trenches, on the Western Front.
Kandinsky was harshly treated by the critics when he exhibited his first abstract works. Jibes, insults and slander are often the price to be paid for courage and sincerity. But encouragement was not slow to follow. His works were published by Piper; Herwarth Walden took his part in his review Der Sturm, while in New York Alfred Stieglitz was attracted by Kandinsky's contributions to the Armory Show and gave the then considerable sum of 800 dollars for one of his canvases. This was the first one to find a buyer in America, and it subsequently caused a sensation at Chicago and paved the way for Kandinsky's success. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York now contains the richest collections of Kandinsky's works that is to be found.
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