“It was out of this strong desire to go beyond fauvism that my paintings of this period were born.” Yet Matisse’s work can be seen to have had as great an influence on her earliest paintings as that of Van Gogh and Gaugin. From Van Gogh she retained the art of extracting the essential character of her models , whom she chose by preference for their expressive ugliness or provocative vulgarity. Gaugin’s example taught her to suppress details in favour of the larger design and to use colours that were not found in nature.
From Matisse she learned the secret of harmonising her figures with their background.
But in 1910, the first exhibition of daring modernist art took place in Paris, it’s main proponents Braque and Picasso, but including also such friends of Robert’s as Metzinger and Le Faucomier; Matisse rather disparagingly gave it the name of Cubism. No seriouse artist of the day could fail to be aware of the aims of cubism, though few were tempted to copy its technique. Delaunay, however, began towards the end of 1910 to veer away from his post-impressionist manner to produce cubist-style paintings the reduced the use of colour almost to monochromatic. It was eventually Sonia who brought colour back into his life.
In 1909 sonia was still painting under the influence of Van Gogh and Gaugin, but the work of Rousseau had also begun to fascinate her.
Sonia’s sense of colour, her passion for colour, went back to her childhood, to the robust primary colours of the Russian villages, peasant costumes and the fairs. Robert called her sense of colour ‘Atavastic.’
[Robert] In the tower paitings and especially the Ville de Paris paintings and especially the fenetre series (all 1910-12), he broke with cubism and rediscovered colour. These free, spontaneous, untethered paintings of fragmented images, described by a recent art critic as ‘lighter-than-air’, were a vital bridge on his way to a completely abstract art, and this was a bridge that he and Sonia crossed together.
[Sonia] Anyone standing in front of this supremely kinetic painting (Bal Bullier) would have felt that Sonia had come a long way in the eight years since her arrival in Paris. It was difficult to find any direct relationship between this worldy and accomplished work and a painting of 1907 such as Philanine. Then she may have been speaking the language of Gaugin, Van Gogh, even Matisse. Now, she had found her own.
Apollinaire wrote of Robert’s work in 1910 “a Heresiarch of cubism” whose paintings unfortunately seemed “to recall an earthquake.” However, in 1912, he wrote of robert’s Ville de Paris’ as “more than an artistic manifestation. This painting marks the advent of a conception of art lost since the great Italian painters.”
Except in the most rigid Bourgeois circles, they were social Lions, members of the energetic, sparkling milieu of modern experimental artists and writers.
It was living in the Iberian Peninsula that opened their eyes to an entirely different light. Sonia writes about it, she notes that all painters have studied light, but light placed against objects – a completely descriptive light – where as she and Robert attacked the very origin of light, the sun and the moon themselves. The prism of colours they worked out from these sources was like a bomb in the history of painting. What they learned from their experiences was that colour has a dynamic power, a life of its own, which always changes under the influence of other colours that act on it. That was where simultaneous contrast had finally led them.
Sonia and Robert Delaunay incorporated an aesthetic of wild and contrasting plays on light into much of their work. They focused their attention on the force and contrast of this subject. It would be interesting to juxtapose this aesthetic with the social side of their lives. Chic, modern and savoir faire seem to be elements incorporated by Sabatini white in their designs and relating PR image. The image of the Avant guard and haute society also played a large part in the lives of Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
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