Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

October 17, 2014 through February 22, 2015
11 Avenue de Président Wilson
Paris, +33 1 53 67 40 00

A blanket stitched by Sonia Delaunay for her baby Charles in 1911 is the most evocative piece in the exhibition “Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (on display through the 22^nd of February and then at the Tate Modern from the 15^th of April through the 9^th of August). That is not to say that Delaunay’s ferocious output and creativity ended there — it was only the beginning. The blanket, crafted of 70 roughly rectangular and triangular pieces of shimmery cloth, placed in relation to each other based on principles of color resonance and harmony that were an obsession of her husband Robert (he drew his theories from the French chemist and color theorist Michel Eugene Chevreul), stands as an epic transition in the history of early abstraction. It also embodies the pragmatism in her approach to her work: she soon stretched and exhibited the blanket as her first work of pure abstraction. One may surmise she did this once the baby had outgrown his blanket.

Delaunay mixed the applied arts with “pure” painting throughout her career. This duality lies at the literal and metaphorical center of the exhibition where a gallery of coats and textiles, and even a promotional film she made in the 1920s, runs on an endless loop. The clothing, furniture and costume design do not have the same vibrancy or theoretical insistence as the paintings. Her striking Manteau pour Gloria Swanson (1925), with radiating rectangular bands, is a dazzling cross between a Russian soldier’s bulky overcoat and early Atari graphics — a bit of Delaunay’s Russian roots with some Aztec thrown in. It lacks the encompassing throbbing exhilaration of Le Bal Bullier of 1913, given pride of place a few rooms earlier.

Posed in counterpoint to the fashion film, which features models lounging in Delaunay fabrics in front of her paintings, is a mighty textile display machine on the opposite wall that the curators have conjured up. Beneath the word “Simultané” four bolts of fabric roll up or down constantly, contrasting the artist’s seemingly endless fountain of design ingenuity. Along the walls are swatches, sketches, kerchiefs and ties reinforcing this point. Unfortunately, it comes across as a bit crass — the same sinking feeling one got on seeing the Louis Vuitton shop placed smack in the center of the 2008 Murakami exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum.

But the baby blanket is not crass, and the clothing designs and the costumes for productions by Tristan Tszara and Sergei Diaghilev are full of the colorful and garish enthusiasm of post-WWI experimentation. They are wild deco colonialist interpretations of Ancient Egypt, for the ballets Cleopatra and Aida (1918). Does this interdisciplinary existence make Delaunay a feminist icon because she straddles both the at-the-time male dominated world of painting and the perceived woman’s sphere of sewing and clothing production? Perhaps her claim to icon status, beyond her talent as a painter, should be her very asexual approach to her practice, a personality trait that presaged later art/entrepreneurial giants such as Warhol, Koons and Hirst. Delaunay had a very sanguine relationship with her clothing and costume design — it was a career that only really took shape after the Russian revolution took place and the money from home (St. Petersburg) ran out. She adroitly hired Russian seamstresses to make her clothing and weave her textiles (the Delaunay sweatshop?) and felt liberated from her commercial responsibilities after the 1929 market crash for all intents and purposes put an end to her fashion business.

“Les Couleurs De l’Abstraction” shows Delaunay at her strongest at the beginning and the end. The exhibition begins with juvenilia — portraits of peasants and friends made on vacation in Finland with her aunt and uncle, then student work heavily influenced by Gauguin and the Fauves. This is followed by the strange process of mutual assimilation that was the marriage of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, one that birthed the Orphism movement (a term coined by Apollinaire), which set up a category of pure abstraction utilizing the methodological approaches of Cubism. Along with Le Bal Bullier is the illustration to accompany Blaise Cendrars’s travelogue poem “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France,” probably the most successful evocation of the Delaunay’s concept of Simultaneity — a confusing theory based around a fascination with technology, applied color theory and interdisciplinary collaboration among the arts. The series “Prismes Electriques” was started in 1913 and became the defining image of both Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s careers — beacons of light with radiating waves or shells of colors.

After the stock market crash, Delaunay returned to painting with renewed vigor. Her most successful series of applied works, though, was a cycle of illustrative murals for the 1937 aerospace pavilion for the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne.” In these she isolates technological objects — the propeller, the cockpit, the dashboard, gears and sparkplugs — and renders them as symbols within a context aesthetically redolent of Orozco and Rivera’s great murals of a the early ‘30s.   The cycle achieves its goal of aggrandizing contemporary technology by injecting the Delaunays’ brand of radiating circles (now neatened up) into a well-crafted layout that has the punch, poignancy and mystique of an engineering blueprint. It is a design sensibility that wouldn’t be surprising on a website in 2015.

The exhibition is vast, as was Delaunay’s output. She remained active, painting and designing rugs and fabrics, well into the late 1970s: she died in 1979 at the age of 94.   Over that very long period she still focused on the circles that had so fascinated her and Robert in the teens — hybrid symbols of electric light-cum-wheel-cum-human head, an all-in-one beacon. Robert died in 1941, and perhaps freed from his influence, Sonia’s beacons become more introspective, as with L’Affereux Jojo (1947) which is less bright and less color-theory obsessed and overwhelmingly gray, the circle also becoming a half-circle now. Maybe the artist is blinking here and catching her breadth. Triptyque (1963) finds her even less obsessed with the ideology of the long-dusty Orphism; the forms are more distinct and freer, and again there are more blacks, ochres and slate colors, the paintings are less optimistic and more worldly. At the heart of the exhibition is the feat that Delaunay took an abstract trope that began with a baby blanket in 1911 and expanded and elaborated on it for almost seven decades, generating a visual/personal timeline that narrates the history of abstraction in the 20^th century.

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October 29, 2007–February 11, 2008

The late 20th century art world had a bad conscience about high art which was vilified as serious, profound, mysterious, spiritual, elitist, pretentious, outmoded and labor-intensive. This led to infatuation with popular culture (silly, superficial, obvious, materialistic, egalitarian, simple, immediate and honest) which still predominates in the new century, and no one better exemplifies this infatuation than Takashi Murakami. His work is the subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, soon to be seen In Brooklyn.

It is difficult to get past the hype that surrounds Murakami, much of it of his own making, and to separate it from the work itself. It may be that Murakami is trying to cancel such a separation and in so doing is questioning the relationship of art to hype and art to consumerism. The thrust of the erudite and entertaining essays in the lavish catalog that accompanies the show point us in that direction, but I feel that it is the least interesting aspect of Murakami’s work, despite what it might be convenient for him to believe in that it provides him with a dialectic that ultimately justifies his own single-minded money-making as part of a deeper strategy to expose ideological fissures in the art establishment. The Louis Vuitton collaboration in joint marketing is thus an integral part of the gallery space, not merely relegated to the gift store where it might more traditionally belong.

There are other, more interesting, less peripheral, issues with which Murakami’s work confronts the early 21st century viewer. The central issue is whether the traditional linguistic and iconographic resources of western art have exhausted themselves, as so many of its practitioners proclaim with something approaching clockwork regularity, and whether they can be revitalized by a shot in the arm from popular and non-western culture. Of course these situations have arisen before, most notably at the inception of Modernism with its appropriation of tribal, psychotic and children’s art.

What distinguishes Murakami from early modernists is that he originates from the other side of the divide, with his training in Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) and his obsession with anime and manga. However he is much more of a hybrid than Picasso or Matisse because his own culture has been so deeply inflected by western influence already. Nihonga, in particular, was an attempt to meld Japanese aesthetics with western techniques and spatial structures.

Thus Murakami does not have to be self-conscious about his eclecticism and can quite happily superimpose characters cloned from Mickey Mouse, with the iconography of Buddhism, the stylistic devices of anime and the aesthetics of Muromachi screen painting. The burning question is what all of this adds up to apart from an exercise in fusion. Tan Tan Bo Puking-a,k.a. Gero Tan of 2002 would be my answer. The vast Mickey Mouse-like figure of Tan Tan Bo silhouetted against a flat cerulean sky stands to Murakami’s ego as Guston’s signature kidney-shaped heads do to his. Both artists share a similar fascination with flatness and scale and both extract their imagery from comic book sources. Guston uses Expressioinist bravura handling to immerse his images within a sea of art historical reference, guaranteeing a type of authenticity, whereas Murakami retains the flatness and blandness of his sources. Tan Tan Bo should not be seen in isolation as this character resurfaces in different guises in much of the artist’s work. His features surmount the vast factory built Oval Buddha of 2007, and they are dismembered and abstracted into the decorative dynamics of Edo screen-like canvases such as PO+KU Surrealism Mr DOB-Yellow, Pink, Blue, Purple, Green,1998.

In Tan Tan Bo Puking the narrative exposition explored in earlier canvases approaches something of a climax in the massive simultaneous eructation of multicolored streams of vomit from a face grimacing a mountainous range of black incisors. We might remember that women of the imperial Japanese court also dyed their teeth black. The sublimely childlike world of playful decorative swirls, joyful cumulus clouds, cobalt skies is cataclysmically aborted, giving way to disgust and despair, but not without a sense of tragic grandeur. For me it is almost as if the wonderfully puerile but illusory balloon of pre-adolescent reverie has been inflated to a bursting point, that will yield the dark night of the soul of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, directly referenced in other paintings of Murakami likeTime Bokan-black 2001. Innocence is under a threat that only the sustained opulence of the colors and the mechanically perfect outlines can pretend to withstand.  This is surely the most compelling meditation on adolescence since Munch’s Puberty. Here the crisis takes on cosmic proportions and new planetary systems seem to evolve from Tan Tan’s various appendages. The disaster is further compounded by the fact that this canvas is a visual inventory of Murakami’s signature icons, the Laura Ashley flowers, magic mushrooms, DOB heads, grotesque Pokemon eyes, Buddha smiles, decorative spirals, all of them breathing their last in an impending cosmic dissolution that might suggest a more compelling form of self-doubt than we normally associate with Murakami’s self-promotional verbal statements.

Murakami should be judged on works like Tan Tan Bo Puking, on whether it can sustain, the intensity and reach of the paintings with which it aligns itself, like the giant, cartoon-haunted, Crumbesque canvases of Philip Guston, the delicate surrealist cosmogonies of Joan Miro or the exploitation of emptiness in Japanese screen painting. It is Murakami’s surprisingly timeless achievement to have wrung from the unpromising and bland stylistic repertoire of anime and manga, executed by large teams of assistants, an original cosmogony sustained by an emotional intensity and conceptual sophistication that renders his flirtation with the world of consumerism at most a side-show and ultimately unnecessary. For me his artistic pedigree derives from Bosch, Guston, Miro and Jakuchi, not Warhol and Koons, as the essays in the catalog suggest.

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