Robert Delaunay Quotes

Learn more about the man behind the paintings, with this comprehensive list of Robert Delaunay quotes, covering his full life and career. More can be found about him in our extensive biography.

Famous Quotes by Robert Delaunay

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

As long as art cannot get free from the object, it will continue to be a description.

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable.

First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.

For me, every man distinguishes himself by his essence his personal movement, as opposed to that which is universal.

Human vision is endowed with the greatest Reality, since it comes to us directly from the contemplation of the Universe.

I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

Simultaneity in light is harmony, the rhythm of colors which creates the Vision of Man.

Simultaneousness is a technique. Simultaneous contrast is the most up-to-date honey of this technique in this field. Simultaneous contrast is visible depth – Reality, Form, construction, representation. Depth is the new inspiration. We live in depth, we travel in depth. I’m in it. The senses are in it. And the mind is too.

The auditory perception is not sufficient for our knowledge of the world; it does not have vastness.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

The idea of the vital movement of the world and its movement is simultaneity.

The need for a new subject has inspired the poets, launching them onto a fresh path and bringing to their attention to poetry of la Tour [the Eiffel tower in Paris], which communicates mysteriously with the whole world. Rays of light, waves of symphonic sounds. Factories, bridges, iron structures, airships, the numberless gyrations of aeroplanes, windows seen by crowd simultaneously.

This happened in 1912. Cubism was in full force. I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artists were producing. I was the heretic of Cubism. I had great arguments with my comrades who banned color from their palette, depriving it of all elemental mobility. I was accused of returning to Impressionism, of making decorative paintings, etc.. .I felt I had almost reached my goal.

The word art means harmony for me. I never speak of mathematics and never bother with the Spirit. My only science is the choice of impressions that the light in the universe furnishes to my consciousness as an artisan which I try, by imposing an Order, and Art, an appropriate representative life, to organize.

This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

This synchronous action then will be the Subject, which is the representative harmony.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Quotes about Robert Delaunay by Art Historians and Fellow Artists

He gives movement itself, the Futurists only illustrate movement.

August Macke

Robert wanted to look straight at the midday sun, the absolute disk.. ..he closed his eyelids and focused in his retinal reactions. Back home, what he tried to commit to canvas was what he had seen with his eyes open and his eyes shut.

Sonia Delaunay

It used to be said of a woman: why she's a Velázquez infanta! Now it is said: she's a Renoir blonde! I have no doubt that, in the future, it will be proclaimed: she's as exuberant as a Delaunay, as noble as a Le Fauconnier, as beautiful as a Georges Braque or Picasso.

Jean Metzinger

Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings - and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself - appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.

Albert Gleizes