History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard.
Une anthologie réunie par Pascal Dethurens.
[Writing on Painting. From Diderot to Quignard. Anthology curated by Pascal Dethurens]
Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages
[Original Version: June 2017 - New Version: April 2019]
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Fig. 61) Aujourd'hui, the posthumous memoirs by Blaise Cendrars, published in 1931
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The century of
abstraction and its reception in literature
After reading Pascal Dethurens' anthology,
I felt the need to dwell in the last part of this post on the question of the
relationship between literature and painting in the twentieth century, with
specific reference to abstract art. We know, in fact, that the whole century,
in all its aesthetic expressions of avant-garde art (from surrealism to cubism,
from the London school to pop art), was characterized by a very close dialogue
between various disciplines: for example, one cannot conceive of Surrealism
without the interaction between his written and pictorial forms. However, also for
all 20th century streams of figurative art (both the most traditional and the
most innovative ones), a principle of continuity with the past prevailed: the
existence of an immediately visible figurative theme, which literates could
describe and narrate in textual form. From this point of view, there was hardly
any substantial difference between the passages by Sartre and those by Diderot
mentioned in Écrire la peinture.
How did the literate community in France react,
instead, when - around 1910 - for the first time the object of art was no
longer visible reality, and therefore a mere description of the object of
painting (the ancient eckphrasis) was
no longer the logical point of departure for men and women of letters writing
about art? The relationship between the community of literates and visual artists
experienced then a transformation: the preferred medium was no longer the use
of art criticism prose by literates, but the verse of the poets seeking an immediate
emotional interaction with painters.
Pascal Dethurens's anthology documented for
instance the interaction between Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and her wife Sonia (1885-1979) and two
of the leading poets of French-speaking modernism: Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961)
and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). In the centre of the attention of the
two poets were two series of paintings by Robert Delaunay: La Tour (1910-1912) and Les
Fenêtres (1912-1913). With the first series - all dedicated to the Eiffel
Tower - the painter tested the principles of the theory of Simultanism. With the second series, dedicated to a representation
of reality mediated by windows, he came very close to abstraction: Les Fenêtres was in fact also a series
of representations of the Eiffel Tower, but the tower itself was no longer
fully visible, because it was observed through windows that were, at the same
time, an impediment to a precise vision of reality, but also an opening to
another world governed by random laws.
With the series of paintings of the Eiffel
Tower from 1910 to 1912 and the theory of Simultanism,
Robert and Sonia Delaunay contributed to coding some of the core aesthetic
elements of modernism in those years, not only in France but throughout Europe.
The Eiffel Tower became the prototype of the cult of modernity (which Umberto
Boccioni will call with an Italian neologism ‘modernolatria’,
i.e. the idolatry of modernity, in 1914) [109]. From a pictorial point of view,
the couple proposed a stream of abstract art which they called 'Simultanism', being inspired by the
theory of 'the simultaneous contrasts of
colours': their works were in fact conceived as combinations of contrasting
or combining colours, which had to be perceived simultaneously by the observer.
The Delaunays adopted the thesis of the nineteenth-century chemist Michel Eugène
Chevreul (1786-1889), described in his work De
la loi du contraste simultanee des couleurs et de l'assortiment des objets
colorés, published in 1839. In 1912 Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) published The Manifeste sur le simultanéisme poétique,
which witnessed the first attempt to apply the same principles to poetic
language in France. At the same time the futurists in Italy were all confronted
with the problems of Simultanism:
Marinetti through his verses in free words (parole
in libertà), Boccioni in visual arts with the concept of universal
dynamism.
In Paris, Robert Delaunay's relationship with
the world of letters was particularly intense in the phases he elaborated Simultanism: as Cendrars himself narrated in his posthumous memoirs entitled Aujord'hui
(Today) of 1931, the first series of paintings – La Tour - was conceived by Delaunay during a series of visits by
the painter to the poet, forced to bed for a month in a hotel room (we were in
1910) for the consequences of an incident: the window of the hotel room offered
in fact his guest an exceptionally beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower.
The second set of paintings – Les Fênetres - was created and completed
in the months when the poet Apollinaire was hosted by the Delaunays at their
home: the poet also accompanied him to Berlin, where the series of pictures was
presented to the public for the first time by Herwerth Walden, the gallerist of expressionists
[110].
Dethurens' anthology includes Cendrars poem “La Tour” (August 1913) and Apollinaire's
poem "Les Fenêtres"
(November 1912), inspired respectively by the first and second series of
Delaunay’s paintings.
As Eric Robertson wrote [111], an example of
the application of the simultaneous principles was La Tour aux rideaux , i.e."The
Eiffel Tower with curtains" of 1910. "Initially depicted from a
single perspective, the tower became, around 1910, the starting point of
experiments in fragmentation and dynamics, with colour schematized into
simplified contrasting patterns. One painting in the series, La Tour aux
rideaux of 1910, is doubly interesting:
it concentrates upon the window motif and offers a graphic model of the
dualistic function of the parergon [from the Greek: accessory element] or frame, discussed by Jacques Derrida.
Neither fully integrated into the visual text nor entirely independent of it,
the parergon falls between the work and its surroundings, and depends on both
for its interactive status" [112].
With the concept of parergon (inspired by the
aesthetic theories of philosopher Jacques Derrida in La Vérité en peinture of 1962), Robertson referred in particular to
the role of the two curtains as an accessory framing interacting with both the real
frame of the painting and the depicted frame of the window: "In the manner of twin columns, the curtains
draw the eye not only towards the view that lies between them but also to the
window and its angled frame, to the very process of framing. This bipartite
inner frame acts as a visual and conceptual focus, both channelling the view
towards the centre of the canvas and emphasizing the conscious act of choice
that led to the picture’s creation. The function of this inner ‘frame' is also
compositional: the angles created by the open curtains echo and accentuate
those of the tower. Dark lines suggesting folds of cloth emphasize the
impression of height and attenuation" [113].
Robertson continued: "The clouds, depicted in the same neutral
tones and bold outlined as the buildings and curtains, are endowed with
solidity: air alone dissolves the tower into refracted segments just as easily
as a ray of pale blue light permeates the curtains on the upper right hand
side. This ray, which seems to emanate from the tower, acts as a discreet clue
to the self-referentiality of the work: it directs our gaze towards the
translucent surface of the curtain and in so doing links the most distant background with
the immediate foreground. This unifying of perspectives creates ambiguity
between the representational depth of the image and the actual flatness of the
canvas. We are reminded that what we behold, besides being a re-creation of the
sensation of perceiving different angles of observation, is ultimately nothing
but combinations of colours on a two-dimensional surface. The window, thus, is
an autoreferential metaphor for Delaunay's own progression towards abstraction.
That the formal distribution of this work was the product of careful planning
is demonstrated by comparing it with later depictions of the tower, in which
almost identical composition is applied to increasingly abstract forms" [114].
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| Fig. 62) Blaise Cendrars, The original manuscript of the poem La Tour, August 1913 |
The poem “Tower”
of Blaise Cendrars, composed that year, was part of the collection Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen
elastic poems, published later in 1919). The theme was the same as the series
of Delaunay’s paintings: modernity and simultaneity. And in fact, Cendrars wrote,
speaking to the Eiffel Tower as if it were a person: " For Delaunay, the Simultaneé, to whom I dedicate this poem/ You are
the paintbrush he dips in light". In the poem, the Tower was seen as the
absolute model of modernity (and as the symbol of the rejection of the past).
But this is not the main point which I find it is worth emphasizing here. More
importantly, Cendrars translated pictorial simultaneity into a simultaneous lyrical
text, without punctuation, characterized by verses that intentionally had length
differences, and based on a sequence of contrasts. "Contrasts - Cendrars wrote in his already quoted memoirs entitled Aujord'hui - are not a black and white, the opposites, the dissonances. Contrasts
are resemblances."
Blaise Cendrars
The Tower
1910
Castellamare
I was dining on an
orange in the shadow of an orange-tree
When, all of a sudden…
It was not Vesuvius
erupting
It was not a cloud of
locusts, one of the ten plagues of Egypt
Nor Pompeii
It was not the
resurrected cries of giant mastodons
It was not the Trumpet
foretold
Nor Pierre Brisset‘s
frog
When, all of a sudden
Fire
Blasts
Schock waves
Flash of simultaneous
horizons
My phallus
O Eiffel Tower!
I haven’t shod you in
gold
I haven’t made you
dance on crystal flagstones
I haven’t doomed you
to the python like a virgin in Carthage
I haven’t dressed you
in a Grecian peplos
I haven’t made you
wander in the circle of the monoliths
I haven’t named you
Tiger of David or Wood of the Cross
Lignum Crucis
O Eiffel Tower!
Great firework of the
Universal Exposition!
At Benares
At Benares
Along the Ganges
Among the onanistic
spinning tops of Hindu temples
And the colorful cries
of the multitudes of the East
You bend, o graceful
palm-tree!
It was you who in the
days of legend of the Hebrews
Confused men’s tongues
O Babel!
And several thousand
years later, it was you who came down in tongues of fire over the Apostles
gathered in your Church
You’ re a mast upon
the open sea
And the North Pole
You shine with all the
splendour of the aurora borealis of your wireless telegraphy
Lianas grow entangled
in the eucalyptus
And you float, old
trunk, along the Missisippi
When
Your jaws fly open
And a caiman chomps a
Negro’s thigh
In Europe you are like
a gallows
(I’d like to be the
tower, to hang from the Eiffel Tower!)
And when the sun goes
down behind you
Bonnot’s head rolls
under the guillotine
In the heart of Africa
that’s you running
Giraffe
Ostrich
Boa
Equator
Monsoons
In Australia you ‘ve
always been taboo
You’re the boathook
Captain Cook used to steer his boat of adventurers
O plumb-line of the
heavens!
For Delaunay, the
Simultaneé, to whom I dedicate this poem.
You are the paintbrush
he dips in light
Gong, tam-tom, zanzibar,
jungle beast, x-ray, express, bistoury, symphony
You are everything
Tower
Ancient god
Modern beast
Solar spectrum
Subject of my poem
Tower
Tower of the world
Tower in motion [115]
(Translation from French by Stephen Sartarelli)
It remains to be said that, in 1913, Sonia
Delaunay prepared an artist book to decorate other poems by Cendrars, which
will be also included in the same collection of the Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques. Sonia’s artist book illustrated, even
visually, the parallelism between the pictorial Simultanism of the Delaunay and the literary Simultanism of Cendrars.
Even closer, if possible, was the connection
between the poem Les Fenêtres (The
Windows), by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the art of Robert Delaunay. This lyrical text was
published by the French poet in 1913 for a personal exhibition of the painter
in Berlin, and was dedicated to him. Not only that: "Les Fenêtres – as Ian Lockerbie wrote in an introductory essay to Calligrammes, the 1946 collection of Apollinaire’s
poems, in which Les Fenêtres was inserted after the death of Apollinaire - was written in the artist's atelier and
alludes to various objects in the studio, including the sea urchin and the
yellow shoes” [116].
At a first reading, Les Fenêtres seems simply a ‘modernist’ poem. Instead, it was also,
and above all, the testimony of how the literate community responded to
abstraction. The painting series Windows
was in fact defined by the painter "The
first germ of colour for the colour” [117]. With this series, the reference
to the reality of things went almost completely lost, replaced by a pure
matching of colours.
It was already mentioned that the relationship
between Apollinaire and Delaunay was indeed very intense: among others, Apollinaire,
the avant-garde poet at the centre of a network of literary and artistic
movements, was of the opinion that the expression 'Simultanism' could give rise to ambiguity and coined, for this type
of art, the today prevalent term 'Orphism'
(Apollinaire considered himself a follower of Orpheus, the mythological poet).
Since then, the painting of the Delaunays and other artists (Fernand
Léger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Kupka) has been called “Orphic”.
At the Berlin exhibition for the Der Sturm Gallery, held between January
and February 1913, Delaunay (who was accompanied, as already mentioned, in the
German capital by Apollinaire) presented some twenty new works made in 1912,
including a dozen on the window theme as a symbol of simultaneity in terms of both
space and time. The window was chosen as a medium, because it did not allow
you to observe reality, but opened the world to random developments. The exhibition was
introduced by a conference of Apollinaire on "Die neue Malerei" (The New Painting), where he presented the
art of Delaunay and Picasso to the German public. At the same time, Der Sturm magazine hosted, in January
1913, a short writing by Delaunay on colours, translated into German by Paul
Klee [118]. In the catalogue of the exhibition, it was published the poem Les Fenêtres by Apollinaire.
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| Fig. 63) The issue of Der Sturm of January 1913. Source: http://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn?a=d&d=bmtnabg191301-02&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------# |
Since 1910, the Berlin magazine Der Sturm was the engine of Berlin's
artistic avant-garde, and in particular of expressionism. Its director,
Herwarth Walden, knew Delaunay since that year (Delaunay's first picture in
this part of the post, or The
Simultaneous Tower of 1910, was dedicated to Walden). Through his magazine
and his gallery, Walden led a dialogue between the most radical European
avant-garde movements (the January 1913 exhibition hosted, in addition to
Delaunay, also paintings by Ardengo Soffici).
Lockerbie also wrote: "For six weeks, in November and December
1912, Apollinaire had been living with the Delaunays. In November Les
Soirées de Paris published an article by
him which consists mainly of quotations from the painter’s conversation,
notably his observations about complementary colours; that article in turn led
to a German version, published in December in Der Sturm, with an introduction and a conclusion by the
poet. A phrase in the conclusion is particularly significant: 'Simultaneity is life itself and whatever be
the succession of elements in a work of art, that work leads to an inevitable
ending, death, while the creator knows only eternity” [119].
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| Fig. 64) The poem Les Fenêtres in a 1913 edition. Source: http://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/291193ga8.jpg |
From all that has been said, it is evident that
Les Fenêtres intended to illustrate in
verses the role that Robert Delaunay assigned to the window theme as a symbol
of simultaneous art. Yet, a mere description of the canvases in ekphrastic terms
was not possible and certainly not in line with Apollinaire's intentions. As
Rosanna Warren wrote, the poet “refused
to describe the painting. Instead, the poem discovers the principle of action
in the paintings, and invents an analogous linguistic enactment" [120].
The only verse in the poem having a direct reference to the painting and the
theory of complementary (red and green) and dissonant (red and yellow) colours
by Delaunay was "From red to green
all yellow dies" at the beginning of the poem (which was repeated
towards the end of the poem in a rhythmic function). The theme of the window was
instead evoked at the beginning and at the end of the poem: "You'll raise the curtain / And now see the window opening... The window opens like an orange / The lovely fruit of light".
For the rest, what is witnessed was the overlapping game of different images,
of distant places, of dissimilar concepts, which the poet offered to the reader
suddenly and casually. The poet sets himself in tune with the painting, not
being able - nor willing - to describe it anymore.
Guillaume Apollinaire
The Windows
From red to green all the yellow
dies
When parakeets sing in their
native forests
Giblets of pihis [Transl:
Imaginary bird often quoted by Apollinaire]
There’s a poem to be done on the
bird with only one wing
We’ll send it by telephone
Giant traumatism
It makes your eyes run
Do you see that pretty girl among
the young women of Turin
The poor young man blew his nose
with his white tie
You’ll raise the curtain
And now see the window opening
Spiders when hands wove the light
Beauty paleness fathomless violets
Vainly we’ll try to take some rest
We’ll begin at midnight
When you have time you have
liberty
Winkles Codfish multiple Suns and
the Sea Urchin of sunset
An old pair of yellow boots in
front of the window
Towers
Towers are the streets
Well
Wells are the squares
Wells
Hollow trees sheltering vagabond
mulattoes
The Chabins sing melancholy songs
To brown Chabines
And the wa-wa wild goose honks to
the north
Where raccoon hunters
Scrape the fur skins
Glittering diamond
Vancouver
Where the train white with snow
and lights flashing through the dark runs away from winter
Oh Paris
From red to green all the yellow
dies
Parigi Vancouver Hyère Maintenon
New York and the Antilles
The window opens like an orange
The lovely fruit of light [121]
(Translation
from French by Anne Hyde Greet)
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NOTES
[109] Boccioni, Umberto - Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico), Milano, Edizioni futuriste di «Poesia», 1914, 469 pages. For an English translation, see: Boccioni Umberto - Futurist painting sculpture (plastic dynamism), edited by Maria Elena Versari, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2016.
[110] Hughes, Gordon - Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, 184 pages. Quotation at page 15.
[111] Robertson, Eric - Painting Windows: Robert Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars, and the Search for Simultaneity, in: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 883-896. See:
[112] Robertson, Eric - 110 Painting Windows (quoted), p. 884.
[113] Robertson, Eric - Painting Windows (quoted), p. 884.
[114] Robertson, Eric - Painting Windows (quoted), pp. 884-886.
[115] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages. Quotation at page 294.
[116] Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes, Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916). A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Anne Hyde Greet, Introduction by S. I. Lockerbie, University of California Press, 1980, 513 pages. Quotation at page 349. See:
[117] Robertson, Eric - Painting Windows (quoted), p. 887
[118] The article is available at
[119] Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes, Poems of Peace and War, (quoted), p. 349
[120] Warren, Rosanna, Orpheus the Painter: Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay, in: Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 3, Modern Poetry and the Visual Arts (summer, 1988), pp. 279-301. Quotation at page 286. See
[121] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 305. The translation is from Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes, (quoted), p. 27-29.
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