For 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 see from the 140-odd paintings, drawings, prints and reliefs that make up the exhilarating Delaunay retrospective organized by French Art Historian Michel Hoog at the Orangerie in Paris this summer, the man belonged to no movement. His rainbow-hued paintings shared very little with cubism. "But they're painting with cobwebs!" was his reaction to the sober, niggling brown-and-gray facets of the first cubist pictures he saw. The tenor of Delaunay's imagination was different: coarser, more exuberant. In a crucial sense, it was more modern as well.
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. The machine culture extolled by these early modernists of the Belle Epoque is our own archaeology, but we cannot revive the mixture of innocent awe and millenarian hope with which they confronted it. Like the faith that raised Chartres, that has gone.
Its 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 of Promethean man before, and it is not surprising that some of Delaunay's images of it—especially the Red Eiffel Tower, 1911-12 (see color)—were tinged with anthropomorphism: a red, two-legged form, trusses and girders, ramping about like Zarathustra.