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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathSounding Image
 
Fensterbilder (Delaunay, Robert)Fensterbilder (Delaunay, Robert)
 
 
 

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motifs started to move, they were even intended to lead to insights into the world over and above the optical effect. His friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, poetically called this way of painting «Orphism.» A piece of Paragone seems to flare up again when we read this statement by Delaunay: «The eye is our most highly developed sense; it is most closely connected with our brain, our consciousness. It conveys the idea of the vital movement of the world and this movement is called simultaneity.» [20]

In Delaunay's case, painting became time-based colour composition. Perception was no longer based on the classical perspective composition of a rectangular framed picture. In his 1912 series of «Window Pictures» Delaunay composed imaged that were metres long, representing the perception of the picture subject as a time sequence, like an excerpt.

Delaunay wrote as follows about his «Window Pictures«: «The choice of ‹Window Pictures› as a title is still a reminder of concrete reality; but the new form the expressive resources are taking can

 

already be seen. These are windows on to a new reality. This new reality means nothing other than spelling out new expressive resources; these create the new form purely physically, as elements of colour. Among other things, these pictorial elements are juxtaposed contrasts that build up pictorial architecture, a complex, similar to an orchestra, developing like movements in colour. […] The series invokes only the sujet, the composition and orchestration of colours. That is the origin, the first appearance of non-representational painting in France. […] The colour is its own function; all its motion is present at every moment, as in musical composition at the time of Bach, or good jazz in our day.» [21]

Delaunay's reflections about the meaning of colour, linked with the loss of perspective and the new pictorial order analogous with musical composition are reminiscent of Kandinky's ideas. In fact the two artists met at the first «Blauer Reiter» exhibition in Munich in December 1911, in which Delaunay also featured. Correspondence between them from autumn 1911 to

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