Robert Delaunay. The invention of pop.
Hazan| N° d'inventaire | 22225 |
| Format | 20 x 23 |
| Détails | 336 p., hardcover. |
| Publication | Paris, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782754107914 |
Can avant-garde painting assume total formal autonomy at the risk of ignoring mass culture? This poses one of the dilemmas of 20th-century modernism. For Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), a major figure in the avant-garde, the answer is unequivocal: sensing the need not to confine modern painting to an anti-illusionist quest, he strives to articulate realism (mimesis) and abstraction (aisthesis). A precursor of pop in The Cardiff Team in 1913, he is also one of the first abstract painters of his generation, with the series of Circular Forms leading to The Disc. The analysis of the sources of L'Équipe de Cardiff (postcards, illustrated magazines, posters, sports, fashion, aviation, etc.) and their inclusion in the aesthetic debates of the time shows how Robert Delaunay reconciles two opposing affiliations of the classical historiography of modern art: "pure painting versus "pop painting." Starting from this manifesto work, Pascal Rousseau's essay renews the approach to the painter who is too readily confined to a decorative orchestrator of color. This underestimates the intuitions of his pioneering research on the status of the artist, the image and abstraction in the era of cosmopolitan consumerism of the early twentieth century. How does Delaunay bring advertising, the cult of muscle, the postcard and the sense of vertigo into his painting, and therefore into the art of his time, how does he contribute to a visual theory of the contemporary based on a thought of the media? This is what Pascal Rousseau teaches us, drawing on a body of images never before collected, in a language that is both scholarly and accessible.
Can avant-garde painting assume total formal autonomy at the risk of ignoring mass culture? This poses one of the dilemmas of 20th-century modernism. For Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), a major figure in the avant-garde, the answer is unequivocal: sensing the need not to confine modern painting to an anti-illusionist quest, he strives to articulate realism (mimesis) and abstraction (aisthesis). A precursor of pop in The Cardiff Team in 1913, he is also one of the first abstract painters of his generation, with the series of Circular Forms leading to The Disc. The analysis of the sources of L'Équipe de Cardiff (postcards, illustrated magazines, posters, sports, fashion, aviation, etc.) and their inclusion in the aesthetic debates of the time shows how Robert Delaunay reconciles two opposing affiliations of the classical historiography of modern art: "pure painting versus "pop painting." Starting from this manifesto work, Pascal Rousseau's essay renews the approach to the painter who is too readily confined to a decorative orchestrator of color. This underestimates the intuitions of his pioneering research on the status of the artist, the image and abstraction in the era of cosmopolitan consumerism of the early twentieth century. How does Delaunay bring advertising, the cult of muscle, the postcard and the sense of vertigo into his painting, and therefore into the art of his time, how does he contribute to a visual theory of the contemporary based on a thought of the media? This is what Pascal Rousseau teaches us, drawing on a body of images never before collected, in a language that is both scholarly and accessible.