Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Robert Delaunay
French; 20th-century
New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
89%
Circular Forms. 1930. Oil on canvas
There's a flatness, even a dullness, to Delaunay's earlier stuff that, at first, seems to contradict or undermine the intensity of his colors — there's a sense in which the younger works than this one want to be what Circular Forms just flatly is, with its largeness and the texture and glisten to its surface and just its general forthrightness. But had the artist gone straight here, it would have been rushed, would have had none of the effect: a painting this full-spectrum needs to be worked up to; the earlier works pay their dues by getting at their effects through color and contrast alone, slowly edging away from the jaggedness and structure of cubism without taking shortcuts to (what we get in this painting) a surface that is uniformly glassy, scaly, variegated, and brilliant, in a way that seems to actually embody the colors. If anything is wrong, it's that (at times) it seems as though work the surface is doing is actually held back by all the structure Delaunay's provided. It would take a painter like Richter, decades later, to fully figure out this problem. (2024)