Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism by Gordon Hughes (review)

In the fifth of Edgar Wind’s famous series of Reith lectures, published in 1963 as “Art and Anarchy,” he addresses the consequences of the mechanization of art. In the course of this discussion, he suggests that “our vision of art is transformed by reproductions. . . . Our eyes have been sharpened to those aspects of painting and sculpture that are brought out effectively by the camera” (p. 69). It seems to him obvious that the artist’s own vision is attuned to this effect in parallel to a realization that art can be mobilized more effectively in books than museums and galleries and this situation shapes the understanding of what art is. He suggests Picasso, van Gogh and the douanier Rousseau fare better than, say, Titian, because schematic plain colors are more suited to the color process. Later, and perhaps more contentiously, he argues that the restricted palette of the color printing process superimposed itself on the artist—or at least those artists for whom public recognition is in some way important—and affected style and taste. What Wind falls short of is the assumption that mechanical color printing changed human perception and, in this regard, he is in accord with cognitive science.

Wind does not include Robert Delaunay in his examples of artists who responded to the influence of color print processes but could well have done so if one buys into the argument of Gordon Hughes’s recent monograph Resisting Abstraction. The publisher claims this to be the first English language study of Delaunay in more than 30 years, and some explanation for this is offered early on with Alfred H. Barr’s famous diagram from 1936, which shows, as Hughes points out, that Orphism was the only movement in the 20th century that, according to Barr, seems to come to a dead end. The project behind Resisting Abstraction is to challenge this idea by showing Delaunay as an important intellectual behind modernism whose contribution may be only just beginning to become clear as we begin to look at science and art through the same lens.

Hughes’s approach is to spend little time on biographical detail and to concentrate on looking at the paintings. He does this slowly in order to see them better. In this mode he regards them in three perspectives: (1) against the backdrop of some influential ideas in cognitive science concerning visual perception, as well as in view of (2) the sudden proliferation of colored posters in Paris and (3) the obsession with movement in philosophy, art and science at the turn of the century. Through this triangulation he offers a particular reading of Delaunay’s 1913 painting Premier Disque, a painting that Hughes argues was important but misunderstood at the time and has continued to be something of an enigma for historians. That is, until now. The book is divided into three substantive sections; the first, “Break (Windows),” outlines cognitive aspects of visual perception as a temporal process, for which the experience of the aerial view and the view through a glazed window act as vivid reminders of (a) the work involved in seeing and (b) the repression of the memory of that work necessary for perception. This forms the bedrock for his analysis of Delaunay’s paintings as interventions in the various strands of cubism in which the viewer and the painting are implicated in the same cognitive enterprise.

The second section, “Punch (Painting),” hinges on the perceptual impact of highly colored advertising posters affixed to public walls in Paris during the first decades of the 20th century and the ways in which these allowed color to transform the perception of architectural structure. Hughes argues that this is crucial to the understanding of Delaunay’s approach to color as a confrontation with the very problem of modernism. The third section, “Movement (Into Abstraction),” makes that problem more explicit in a discussion of...