Delaunay Quotes & Sayings

The sun rises at midnight. — Sonia Delaunay

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. — Robert Delaunay

Colour is the skin of the world, — Sonia Delaunay

About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings. — Sonia Delaunay

I love creation more than life, and I must express myself before disappearing. — Sonia Delaunay

As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Seeing is in itself a movement. — Robert Delaunay

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

Painting is by nature a luminous language. — Robert Delaunay

It was a tradition to represent a dancer frozen in a chosen position, like a snapshot. I broke away from this tradition by superimposing postures, blending light and motion and scrambling the planes. — Sonia Delaunay

In the sky we had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, and the motion of color. — Sonia Delaunay

ZENITH
NOON beats out
on its solar anvil
the rays of light — Sonia Delaunay

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

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

Vision is the true creative rhythm. — Robert Delaunay

Genius requires an audience. For all his cleverness, Delaunay was an artist and as vulnerable as any of his kind to the desire to vaunt his brilliance. And there were few, very few, people capable of appreciating his art. I did not know, then, how deep-laid a game they played with each other, nor what part in it I was to play. All I knew was that she was the audience he chose. — Jacqueline Carey

All this I knew, and yet it was a different thing, to learn it from Delaunay: not stories, but histories. For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. These events, so distant in legend, play a part in shaping the very events we witness about us, each and every day. When I understood this, Delaunay said, I might begin to understand. — Jacqueline Carey

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. — Robert Delaunay

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

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. — Robert Delaunay

Our understanding is correlative to our perception. — Robert Delaunay

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. — Robert Delaunay

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. — Robert Delaunay

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

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

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

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors. — Robert Delaunay

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. — Robert Delaunay

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

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

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

For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art. — Sonia Delaunay

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

One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color with another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinite variety of images. — Sonia Delaunay

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting. — Robert Delaunay

Nature engenders the science of painting. — Robert Delaunay

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 ... — Robert Delaunay

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