1913Robert Delaunay exhibits his "Windows" paintings in Berlin: the initial problems and paradigms

of abstraction are elaborated across Europe.

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"c ezanne broke the fruit dish," Robert Delaunay(1895-1941) once remarked, "and we should not glue ittogether again, as the Cubists do." This call for abstrac­

tion is clear enough, yet its actual development was complicated:centered on painting, abstraction was driven by diverse motiva­

tions, methods, and models. Some artists deepened the painterlyaspect of Impressionism; others, the expressive dimension of

'" Postimpressionism; still others, the linear design ofArt Nouveau.The fragmented "fruit dish" of Cezanne and Picasso was influen­tial to many painters on the verge of nonrepresentational art;the broad color fields of Matisse were inspirational to others;and the bold geometric forms of African sculpture also served as

an important provocation, sometimes replaced or supplementedby folk art (and, in Russia, by religious icons). In 1912-13 suchprecedents and provocations converged to allow the recognitionof abstraction as a value, even a necessity, in its own right. Sinceabstraction is primordial to the arts of several cultures, there is

no question of a single origin or a first abstraction: in this sense,abstraction was found as much as it was invented. In a famous

• anecdote Wassily Kandinsky told how, when he returned onenight to his studio in Murnau, Germany (he dated the event to1910), he failed to recognize one of his paintings upside down in

the dim light-only to discover the expressive potential ofabstract forms through this experience.

If there was no one parent of abstraction, there were severalmidwives, in particular the Frenchman Delaunay, the Russian SoniaTerk (1885-1979; she married Delaunay in 1910), the Dutchman

II Piet Mondrian, and the Russians Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich(1878-1935). The1astthree are often given pride ofplace as the mostcommitted, but other early abstractionists include the CzechFrantisek Kupka (1871-1957), the Frenchman Fernand Leger

(1881-1955), the Russian Rayonists Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964)

and Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), the English VorticistWyndham Lewis, the Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Gino Sev­erini, the German-Swiss Paul Klee (1879-1940), the Alsatian Hans

• Arp (1888-1966), the Swiss Sophie Taeuber (1889-1943; she

married Arp in 1921), the American Synchromists Morgan Russell(1886-1953) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973), and

still others like the American Arthur Dove (1880-1946), who called

his near-abstractions "extractions." This list makes two points

obvious at once: abstraction was international, and many of itsinnovators were not formed in avant-garde Paris. Why would this

'" be so? Although Matisse and Picasso opened the way to abstraction,they were too invested in the world of objects-or, more precisely,in the visual play of figures and signs that this world afforded-toenter into abstraction fully. On the other hand, Kandinsky, Male­vich, Mondrian, Klee, and Kupka were formed in cultures (Russian,

Dutch, German, Czech) whose metaphysical imperatives and/oriconoclastic impulses might have made abstraction less alien.

In this respect Russia was especially important as a crucible forabstraction. There were important collections of avant-gardepainting (the Shchukin Collection alone boasted thirty-seven

• Matisses and forty Picassos), vigorous exhibitions of internationalart not only in St. Petersburg and Moscow but in provincial citiestoo, and a range of groups eager to assimilate the lessons of Sym­bolism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Cubism, as well as to elaborate onfolk art, children's drawings, and medieval icons (an exhibition of

restored icons was staged in Moscow in 1913). The latter interestswere strong in Larionov, who was drawn to the popular wood­carvings known as lubki, and Goncharova, whose early paintings ofpeasant life also reflect the simple forms and strong outlines

of peasant carvings, embroidery, and enamels. Larionov andGoncharova were velY active in exhibition-making too ("Knaveof Diamonds" in 1910 and "The Donkey's Tail" in 1912 were the

II most important); and inspired by Cubist and Futurist works,

they moved away from primitivist experiments toward a form ofabstraction marked by fractured lines and luminous colors-astyle that Larionov dubbed Rayonism for the manner in which thesurface of the painting seems to be struck by multiple rays of lightthat cross, crystallize, and sometimes dissolve there. The structure

of these paintings owes much to Cubism, but the dynamism isFuturist (as is the rhetoric that supported them), and this combi­nation of Cubist faceting and Futurist movement resulted inpaintings that are among the earliest abstractions anywhere.Only a few such works were made, however, before Larionov and

Goncharova fled the war for Paris (where they were often commis­sioned to design sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes produced

• by Sergei Diaghilev).

'" 1903,1906 .1908 1111908,1915,1917,1944a .1908,1909, 1916a, 1918 A 1906, 1910, 1911, 1912 II 1910 1111909,1911 .1919

118 1913 I Abstraction spreads across Europe

Even as abstraction moved away from a mimetic relation to theworld, it did not necessarily embrace the "arbitrary" nature of the

A visual sign as explored in Cubist collage and construction. Abstractartists might have declined to depict worldly things, but theyoften aspired to evoke transcendental concepts-such as "feeling,""spirit," or "purity"-and in this way they replaced one type ofgrounding, one form ofauthority, with another. (In such influentialtexts as "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" [1911], Kandinsky calledthis new authority "internal necessity," and others came up with

similar coinages.) Such insistence on transcendental truths betraysan anxiety that abstraction might be arbitrary in two additionalsenses. First, arbitrary in the sense of decorative: in a 1914 lecture inCologne, Kandinsky cautioned that"ornamental" abstraction mightimpede rather than produce the requisite transcendental effect of

art. And, second, arbitrary in the sense of meaningless: faced with thecharge, actual or anticipated, that abstraction had no meaning at all,its proponents often overcompensated with tendentious claims ofabsolute meanings-transcendental for Kandinsky, revelatory for

• Malevich, utopian for Mondrian, and so on. When not defined insuch grandiose terms, abstraction was often framed negatively­against art based in mimesis (which was regarded as academic)

and against design intended as decoration (which was regarded as alow or applied form). But many exceptions qualify this rule. Forexample, how are we to categorize the grids of Sophie Taeuber [1],

who sometimes based these works (which predate the first modularabstractions by Mondrian) on the quasi-spontaneous arrangements

• of collaged squares of Hans Arp? For his part, Arp called them"probably the first examples of 'concrete art'," at once "pure and

independent" and"elementary and spontaneous." Are theyhigh art?Low? Transcendental in ambition? Decorative? Programmatic?Aleatory? These works complicated such hierarchical oppositionsalmost before theywere in place.

Definitions and debates

Standard definitions favor the idea of abstraction as idealization.

The Oxford English DictionalJ offers "separated from matter,""ideal," and "theoretical" for the adjective abstract, and "deduct,"

"remove," and "disengage" for the verb. Appropriate for someartists who evoked ideal states through disengagement from theworld, these meanings did not suit others who privileged the oppo­

site terms-the materiality ofpaint on canvas, or the worldliness ofutilitarian designs. This tension between idealist and materialistimperatives runs throughout modernist abstraction, and it is notsolved by related terms such as "nonobjective" or "pure." Abstrac­

tion approaches the nonobjective by definition; on the other hand,many artists sought "objectivity" above all-to make an art as"concrete" and as "real" as an object in the world. Indeed, Delau­nay, Leger, Arp, Malevich, and Mondrian all declared abstractionthe most realist of modes for this very reason. So, too, abstractionwas often promoted as "pure," the final refinement of art for its

own sake; on the other hand, purity was often associated with

1 • Sophie Taeuber, Horizontal Vertical, 1917

Watercolor, 23 x 15.5 (9 x 6Y,)

reduction to the constituent materials of a medium, the stuff of

paint and canvas, which are difficult to see as pure. In the end,these tensions are integral to abstraction, which is best definedas a category that manages such contradictions-holds them in

suspension, or puts them into dialectical play.The materialist/idealist opposition governed discourses around

abstraction as well. Some artists were guided by Platonic, Hegelian,or spiritualist philosophies. For instance, Malevich, Kandinsky,

A Mondrian, and Kupka were all influenced by Theosophy, which

held (among other beliefs) that man evolved from physical to spiri­tual states in a series of stages that could be evoked by geometricforms; in Evolution (1911), Mondrian imaged the geometric subli­mation of a female figure in this way. Perhaps paradoxically, some

artists also looked to science to support the idealist version ofabstraction. "Why should we continue to follow nature," Mondrianasked around 1919, "when many other fields ·have left naturebehind?" In this regard non-Euclidean geometry interested artists

• as diverse as Malevich and Marcel Duchamp for its nonperspectivalconception of space and its antimaterialist idea of form.

In addition, analogies were made to other arts, especially music.

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A 1912 .. 1908,1915,1917,19448 111918 A 1908, 1915, 1917 "1914,1915,1918,1935,19668,19938

Abstraction spreads across Europe I 1913 119

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"All art," the English aesthetician Walter Pater famously remarked,"constantly aspires towards the condition of music"; so it was stillfor some artists in the first generation of abstractionists. (This

points to a further paradox: can the essence of one art, painting, befound via another art, such as music?) Klee and Kupka were drawnto Baroque and classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach in particu-

Alar; Kandinsky, to late-Romantic and modern music, especiallyRichard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg. Indeed, Kandinsky pat­terned the categories of his early abstractions-"Improvisations,""Impressions," "Compositions"-on music, which also influencedhis emphasis on color tone, linear rhythm, "thorough-bass"

(a notion derived from Goethe), and immediacy to feeling. Kupka,too, stressed the Symbolist analogy between pure music and purepainting, with the attendant implication that such art could actdirectly "on the soul" without the distraction of content or subjectmatter; his large canvas AmOlpha, Fugue in Two Colors [21 is often

claimed as the first nonfigurative painting to be exhibited publiclyin Paris, at the Salon d'Automne in 1912, though it was inspired in

part by the mundane movements ofa multicolored ball (a playthingofhis stepdaughter), as well as by the celestial motions ofthe planets(which had also informed his previous Disks ofNewton paintings) .

.. For his part, Mondrian adored jazz: he found its syncopated rhythm

analogous to his asymmetrical equilibrium of color planes, and itsresistance to melodic narratives parallel to his resistance to tempo­ral readings ofvisual art.

Other abstract artists were driven by materialist concerns. Somelooked to abstraction as the only mode adequate to the becoming­

abstract of the object-world in a world transfigured by new modesof commodity production, public transportation, and imagereproduction. The project to capture the increased mobility ofproducts, people, and images in the modern city was not strictly

II Futurist; it also provoked artists such as Leger to a paradoxical

type of realist abstraction. In his Contrast of Forms [3], we see asymbiosis of human and mechanical forms abstracted as if tothe geometric specifications of the canvas. Indeed, by the end ofthe decade Leger would conceive painting, in analogy with the

machine, as a device of interrelated parts. Yet already in 1913 hereferred the abstraction of his painting, as well as the separationof all modernist arts, to a capitalist division of labor-a moderncondition that he sought to make a modernist virtue:

Each art is isolating itself and limiting itself to its own domain.

Specialization is a modern characteristic, and pictorial art, like all

other manifestations ofhuman genius, must submit to its law; it is

logical, for by limiting each discipline to its own pUlpose, it enables

achievements to be intensified. In this way pictorial art gains in

realism. The modern conception is not simply apassing abstraction,

valid onlyfor afew initiates; it is the total expression ofa newgener­

ation whose needs it shares and whose aspirations it answers.

+ Cubism was the first style to perform this paradox of an art that

appears both abstract and realist, and it remained the crucible formost abstract artists. Yet "Cubism did not accept the logical conse-

2 • Frantisek Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, 1912

Oil on canvas, 211.8 x 220 (83% x 86%)

3 • Fernand Leger, Contrast of Forms, 1913

Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 (21 % x 18)

A 1908 .. 1917, 1944a II 1909 + 1911,1912

120 1913 I Abstraction spreads across Europe

4· Piel Mondrian, Tableau No. 2/Composition VII, 1913

Oil on canvas, 104.5 x 111.1 (41 Ye x 43%)

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quences of its own discoveries," Mondrian remarked in a retrospect

shared by others, "it was not developing towards its own goals, the

expression of pure plastics." Thus in 1912-13 some artists pushed

A the "analytical" aspect of Cubism to dissolve the motif altogether.

They did so either in linear coordination with the implicit grid ofthe

canvas, as with Mondrian in a work such as Tableau No. 2/Composi­tion VII [4], or through prismatic effects ofcolor seen as light, as with

Delaunay in a work such as Fenetres simultanes sur la ville (Simulta­neous Windows on the City) [5]. IfMondrian explicated the grid in a

way that exceeded the faceted planes of Cubism, Delaunay intensi­

fied color in a manner that was alien to its muted palette. Meanwhile,

other artists pushed the "synthetic" aspect ofCubism: the flat shapes

A ofCubist collage were the immediate precedent for the abstract color

planes of Malevich, while the factual elements of Cubist construc­

tion, which Picasso showed Vladimir Tatlin in Paris in the spring of

• 1914, were one provocation ofhis Constructivist "analysis ofmateri­

als." Some kind of passage through Cubism became almost a

prerequisite for followers: "From a [Cubist] analysis of the volume

and space of objects to the [Constructivist] organization of ele­

ments," the Russian Liubov Popova (1889-1924) wrote in a 1922

studio note, as ifthis development were already a catechism.

In most instances one element of painting was made dominant,

even turned into a medium of meaning in its own right: thus the

privileging of verticals and horizontals in Mondrian, of color as

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light in Delaunay, of monochrome geometries in Malevich. Soon

these elements were refined further into two relatively stable para-

A digms of abstract painting: the grid and the monochrome. To a

great extent they became fixed because the grid worked to undo the

primordial oppositions ofline and color, figure and ground, motif

and frame (it was the genius ofMondrian to explore these possibil­

ities), and the monochrome worked to negate the two dominant

paradigms ofWestern painting since the Renaissance: the window

and the mirror (it was the hubris of Malevich to announce the end

of these old orders).

In 1913, as they advanced toward the grid and the monochrome

respectively, Delaunay and Malevich provide an instructive con­

trast. Delaunay mostly scoffed at models extrinsic to painting:

"I never speak ofmathematics and never bother with spirit"; "I am

horrified by music and noise." Concerned with "pictorial realities"

alone, he looked to color to cany all aspects of painting: "color

gives depth (not perspective, nonsequential but simultaneous) and

form and movement." To this end, Delaunay developed "the law of

simultaneous contrasts," which French artists from Delacroix to

Seurat had adapted from an 1839 treatise by the chemist Michel­

Eugene Chevreul, into his own notion of simultancHsme. Besides

color contrasts, this "simultaneity" pertains to the immediacy of

pictorial image to retinal image, indeed to the transcendental

simultaneity of the visual arts as opposed to the mundane tempo­

rality of the verbal arts (this opposition is a persistent one in

modern aesthetics from the German Enlightenment philosopher

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [1729-81] to the late-modernist critics

5· Robert Delaunay, Fenetres simultanees sur la ville, 1911-12

Oil on canvas and wood, 46 60 (18'/8 X 23%)

A Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried). In some of these interests

Delaunay was joined by Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald­

Wright, who were also active in Paris in these years. They too

treated light in terms of prismatic color, though they allowed for

effects of spatial projection and even temporal duration that

Delaunay tended to resist; they also pursued musical analogies for

abstraction that Delaunay tended to dismiss.

Delaunay made his breakthrough in his "Windows" series, some

twenty-three paintings and drawings executed in 1912, thirteen of

which were shown to great effect in Berlin in January 1913 (he had

• previously exhibited with the Blaue Reiter in Munich). To coincide

with the show, IDee translated a text by Delaunay titled "Light" that

presented a series of equations among color, light, eye, brain, and

soul. In his aesthetic the painting is the "window" ofall these "trans­

parencies"-a medium abstracted into immediacy, dissolved into

what it mediates. In this way Delaunay hardly rejected the old para­

digm of painting-as-window; on the contrary, he purified it: the

reality ofvision is delivered in the abstraction ofpainting. Consider

Simultaneous Windows on the City, which set the compositional type

for the series. The Eiffel Tower, the central motifofhis entire oeuvre,

is now vestigial, its green arcs caught up in a play of opaque and

transparent color planes pushed beyond Cubist faceting toward a

post-Cubist grid (which, in the neo-Impressionist fashion ofSeurat,

Delaunay extended to the frame). The windows are thus referential,

pictorial, and objective all at once; they reconcile the "sublime

subject" ofParis with the "self-evident structure" ofpainting, as the

III poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, a great Delaunay supporter, once

remarked. Delaunay rendered the medium opaque, only to make it

disappear again in the interests of transparent immediacy. In effect,

Simultaneous Windows on the City are windows without curtains,

almost eyes without lids: color as light is nearly blinding here. The

next step was to do away altogether with the windows in order to

present the painting in direct analogy with the retina. This is what

Delaunay did in Disk [6], the purest of abstractions at this time, a

circular painting of seven concentric bands of solid colors divided

into quarters, with the more intense primaries and complementaries

closer to the center. Although sometimes dismissed as a mere

demonstration ofcolor theory-a color chart in fact-Disk contains

resources for abstraction (utter nonreferentiality and opticality,

structured canvas and composition) that would not be developed

fully for another fifty years or more. The year 1913 was also a signifi­

cant one for Sonia Terk Delaunay, who, already active in design

(primarily books and embroidery), illustrated The Prose of theTranssiberian and of the Little Jeanne ofFrance by the avant-garde

poet Blaise Cendrars [7]. Published on a single sheet of paper two

meters long folded into twelve panels, this object-book combined

avant-garde abstraction and typography (the same text was set in ten

typefaces, and a railroad map was included) in order to evoke the

prismatic simultaneity of modern life. Often exhibited and repro­

duced, the book cover was widely influential (Terk may have

affected German modernists almost as much as her husband did),

and its success encouraged her to apply the same "simultaneist"

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122 1913 I Abstraction spreads across Europe

A 1942a, 1960b .1908 1111911,1912

6· Robert Delaunay, Premierdisquesimultane (Disk [The First DiskJ),1913-14

Oil on canvas, diameter 135 (52%)

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rhythms of abstract colors to other designs-clothes, posters, even

electric lamps devised to diffuse light into color on Paris streets.

Malevich took a different course: not to purify painting-as­

window but to paint it out. He referred his first total abstraction,

A Black Square (1915), to a sketch for a backdrop that he designed for

a Futurist opera, VictOlJ over the Sun (1913), an opera opposed toSymbolist art ("the old, accepted concept of the beautiful sun," its

composer V. N. Matiushin once scoffed) as well as to naturalist

theater. Here Malevich places, in a perspectival box, a square

divided diagonally into a black triangle above and a white triangle£1915

below in order to evoke the "victory over the sun," the eclipse of

light by dark, perhaps the overcoming of empirical vision and per­

spectival space by transcendental vision and modernist infinity [8 J.In this sketch the countdown to his own private tnbularasa begins:on the other side of this "zero of form," Malevich announced, lies

"the supremacy ofpure feeling in creative art"-hence his term for

his abstract style, Suprematism.

Thus Delaunay and Malevich appear to be opposed: the first pro­

claims the transparency of the window to color as light; the second,

the victory over the sun in the triumph of the black square. But both

Abstraction spreads across Europe 11913 123

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7 • Sonia Terk Delaunay, La Prose du Transsiberian et de la Petite Jehanne de

France (The Prose of the Transsiberian and of the Little Jeanne of france), 1913

Watercolor on paper, 193.5 x 37 (76'18 x 14%)

are high priests ofpure vision, and this renders them opposites thatbelong together. Even as Delaunay atomizes the motif in his coloras light, while Malevich darkens it through his eclipse of the sun,both cancel one relation to reality only to affirm another, higher

relation, and in this transformation they are joined by others suchas Kandinsky and Mondrian for whom abstraction is the apotheo­sis of the real, not its downfall. They may render the mediumopaque, self-evidently material as canvas and paint, but they do soin order to render it transparent again-to feeling, spirit, or purity,

8' Kazimir Malevich, sketch for Victory over the Sun, Act 2, Scene I, 1913

Graphite pencil on paper, 21 x 27 (8'14 x 10%)

all of which these abstractions are asked to signify at one timeor another.

In the end abstraction is a paradoxical mode that suspends suchoppositions-between spiritual effect and decorative design,between material surface and ideal window, between singular workand serial repetition (bereft ofexternal referents, abstract paintingstend to be read internally, in terms ofone another, in sets, and theyare often designated in this manner too: "Untitled # 1,2,3 ... ").

The materialist/idealist contradiction might be the most profoundofall: painting as a plane covered with paint, the medium disclosedin its empirical materiality, versus painting as a map of a transcen­dental order, a window to a world of spirit. For the French

A philosopher Michel Foucault, however, this relation is less contra­dictOly than complementary: modern thought, he argues, oftencomprehends both kinds of investigations, empirical and tran­scendental, and both kinds of dispositions, materialist and idealist.

Nonetheless, this tension is experienced as a contradiction not onlyin modernist art but also in modern culture at large, and it suggestsone reason why this culture has privileged artists who, like Mon­drian, are able to hold on to both poles at once, who offer aesthetic

resolutions to this apparent contradiction.

FURTHER READING

Yve-Alain Bois, "Malevitch: Ie carre, Ie de9re zero," Macula, no. 1, 1978

Arthur A. Cohen (ed.), The New Art of Color: The Writings ofRobert and Sonia Delaunay (New

York: Viking Press, 1978)

Michael Compton (ed.), Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background ofAbstract Art

1910-1920 (London: Tate Gallery, 1980)

Gordon Hughes, "The Structure of Vision in Robert Delaunay's 'Windows' ," October, no. 102,

Fall 2002

Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," The Originality of the Avant·Garde and Other Modernist My1hs

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)

Fernand Leger, Functions ofPainting, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1973)

Kazimir Malevich, Essays onM 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen (London: Rapp and WhITing, 1969)

A 1971

124 1913 I Abstraction spreads across Europe