Robert Delaunay, Portuguese Woman © Coleccion Carmen Thyssen, Madrid
Look at this painting. When I first saw it, it was love at first sight. I can't conjure a happier, more vibrant painting in my mind if I tried. But the painting's title confused me. Portuguese Woman. I could see no woman. At first, all I could see were colourful discs, lines, curves. Colours that were bold and muted at the same time. Softness and vibrance appearing together. They might sound contradictory but look at this painting and you will see they are not. But, where is the Portuguese woman? Where is she?
Suddenly, I saw her. Do you see? She is standing right next to the second disc that's at the middle of the painting; the disc that's mostly orangish-yellow, right below the first central one. She is holding it and underneath it are all these other colourful discs, semi-discs.
Water, bangles, eggs, flowers, trees, light, night and day-- these are all the things I think/thought/see when I look at the painting. And what do I feel? What stays? Since my first glimpse of the painting till now, I've spent a lot of time just looking at it. And when I have moved away from seeing it on screen, it has lingered in my mind like a peaceful view. The defined, sure and simultaneously soft colours of the painting have turned into a feeling of harmony inside me. In my mind, the painting has become like an invisible patchwork quilt, shrouding me in a gentle yet certain warmth.
Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously 1st part 3rd Motif, credit The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976
When I move away from the Portuguese woman, I come to this patch of a window. What do I see? A fragmented green mountain, a slice of an apple, a paper fan morphing into--, the silhouette of a tree dark amid the glow of forest fire. Fragmentations and possibilities of wholeness glimpsed through a frosted window where light shines in. I also see that you can see an ironing board... But I just see this oval window standing out in the middle of white space. And as my eyes move across this surface, I again find a sense of harmony. The rounded container that holds the seemingly straight lines and defined curves in itself probably brings a sense of smoothness. But so do the colours and the flow of the lines. Again, no matter how instinct wants to tell me there should be something jarring about the painting, the experience is different. I am left again with a feeling of mutedness, softness, harmony.
As someone with no formal training in art, I often falter at my own experience and find it to be lacking authority. Maybe it's not so much my own belief entirely but the oft-encountered perception of many around me that brings this echo within. And it's this uncertainty that made me stop looking at my experience of these paintings and look into the story behind Robert Delaunay's Windows series. I chanced upon lines that very much bring the experiencer (in Delaunay's writing, this space is occupied by the artist) into the foreground. So, I end with his words as reflective companions of his vibrant world.
"Without visual perception there is no light, no movement," Delaunay wrote in the summer of 1912. "This movement is provided by relationships of uneven measures, by color contrasts, which constitute Reality."
"The Windows," he wrote, "truly began my life as as an artist."
Quote source: MOMA
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