"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"
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Delaunay treats “communication” less like polite exchange than like a kind of electrical circuit: meaning happens when competing forces meet and spark. The sentence piles up friction words - “antagonisms, rivalries, movements” - to insist that art isn’t born from serenity but from collision. For a painter associated with Orphism and the visual hum of modern life (city crowds, rotating wheels, Eiffel Tower geometry, simultaneous color), that’s not metaphor. It’s a program. Modernity is a field of competing signals; the artist’s job is to tune in, intensify the interference, and make it legible.
The subtext is a rejection of art as decoration, moral lesson, or private reverie. “Decisive moments” suggests history speeding up: early 20th-century Paris, new technologies, war, mass politics, the collapse of old certainties. In that churn, the “soul” doesn’t evolve by retreating inward; it evolves by being forced into relation - by comparing, measuring, testing itself against other energies. Delaunay’s “communication” is social and perceptual at once: a painting communicates through the clash of colors and forms, but also through its ability to translate an era’s rivalries into sensation.
“It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art” reads like an absolutist dare. He’s narrowing the brief to one demand: art must stage the tensions that produce reality, because that’s how a person “realizes himself on earth.” Not transcendence, not purity - selfhood as a modern construction, hammered out in the noisy, competitive, luminous traffic between things.
The subtext is a rejection of art as decoration, moral lesson, or private reverie. “Decisive moments” suggests history speeding up: early 20th-century Paris, new technologies, war, mass politics, the collapse of old certainties. In that churn, the “soul” doesn’t evolve by retreating inward; it evolves by being forced into relation - by comparing, measuring, testing itself against other energies. Delaunay’s “communication” is social and perceptual at once: a painting communicates through the clash of colors and forms, but also through its ability to translate an era’s rivalries into sensation.
“It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art” reads like an absolutist dare. He’s narrowing the brief to one demand: art must stage the tensions that produce reality, because that’s how a person “realizes himself on earth.” Not transcendence, not purity - selfhood as a modern construction, hammered out in the noisy, competitive, luminous traffic between things.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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