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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 a "modern" phenomenon. Its sense of disciplined energy appealed to him, and in the various versions of The Cardiff Team, he set forth a compendium of favorite images: the box-kite biplane in the sky, the Tower, a Ferris wheel, a bright yellow bill board for an aircraft-manufacturing firm named Astra and the joyously leaping rugby players.
The link between this world of phys ical prowess and Delaunay's abstract disc-paintings was light. The filament bulb was just beginning to transform the appearance of Paris, and artificial light fascinated Delaunay. His earlier paintings, done under the influence of Seurat and the pointillists, contained sun discs rendered in thick dabs of pure color. A recurrent image in the poetry of the pre war avantgarde, especially in Apollinaire's, was of a world revived, bathed, transformed by natural and artificial light. That was the essential subject of Delaunay's disc-paintings. An eye used to the targets and stripes of painting in the 1960s might seize on Delaunay's First Disc as a prophecy. But Delaunay's image was meant to be cosmic, its intentions mystical, and with its luminous feathery hues, First Disc radiates a subtle intensity of feeling that its descendants cannot claim.
Harmonious Balance. Born and raised in Paris, the son of a well-off engineer, Delaunay was not afflicted by the poverty that befell most of his fellow artists. He gave all his time to painting. From that aspect, he was lucky in marriage too. His Russian-born wife, Sonia Terk (whom Delaunay met in 1909), was a gifted artist, and they worked out an unusually harmonious balance between their talents. After staying a few weeks with the young couple in 1912, Apollinaire sighed that "The Delaunays start talking art as soon as they wake up." In his worse moments, Delaunay was a crashing bore, capable of emptying a room with his theoretical diatribes. He cannot have been easy to live with. "An artist can never be egoceritric enough," he liked to announce. He was, to the last, an only child.
The 1914 war caught the Delaunays unawares; they were in Portugal, and they stayed there and in Spain until 1920. In so doing Delaunay missed the horrors of the front, as Leger, Braque and Apollinaire did not. But for some reason his painting, after he got back to Paris, was never quite to regain the life-affirming energy of his prewar work.