Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism

by Gordon Hughes

Robert Delaunay was one of the leading artists working in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and his paintings have been admired ever since as among the earliest purely abstract works. With Resisting Abstraction, the first English-language study of Delaunay in more than thirty years, Gordon Hughes mounts a powerful argument that Delaunay was not only one of the earliest artists to tackle abstraction, but the only artist to present his abstraction as a response to new scientific theories of vision. The colorful, optically driven canvases that Delaunay produced, Hughes shows, set him apart from the more ethereal abstraction of contemporaries like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and František Kupka. In fact, Delaunay emphatically rejected the spiritual motivations and idealism of that group, rooting his work instead in contemporary science and optics. Thus he set the stage not only for the modern artists who would follow, but for the critics who celebrated them as well.

Genres: Art

184 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2014

Reviews

[Arya · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that provides nuanced readings of Delaunay’s most incomprehensible works. Very interesting contextualization of those works historically, within a time of emerging technologies such as film and changing scientific and philosophical ideas of human vision.

[Shuhui Shen]

It deserves a long review but I will put it into my dissertation.