LYRICAL CUBIST

ROBERT DELAUNAY was a big, blond, bright-eyed Parisian who had a passion for painting and was inordinately ambitious. As a youth, wrote Gertrude Stein, Delaunay "was always asking how old Picasso had been when he had painted a certain picture. When he was told he always said, Oh I am not as old as that yet. I will do as much when I am that'age." When he was only 21, he submitted Manege de Cochons (a twirling semi-abstract with pigs racing about and black-stockinged legs and top-hatted figures joining in the carrousel of life) to the 1906 Salon d'Automne. It so enraged Painter Georges Rouault, a member of the jury, that he threw it to the floor and trampled it to shreds. After that, Delaunay moved into his fruitful "destructive" period.

"No More Geometry." The year was 1910, and cubism was becoming the rage. Delaunay took the drab monochromes, static angularities and enclosed planes of cubism and filled them with light, air and movement. "Light deforms everything, breaks everything--no more geometry," he wrote. Assiduously following his theory, Delaunay painted his famed series of the Eiffel Tower (see color page). The tower exploded under the impact of light, defying the law of gravity, ignoring geometry. A new eye and an original brush had brought both a dynamic and lyrical note to cubism.

Delaunay quickly swept on to the uncharted frontiers of the abstract, becoming one of the original pioneers with Kandinsky and Picabia. He called this his "constructive" period. Delaunay's interest was concentrated on color. His theorizing (he would talk for hours, even if no one seemed to be listening, "to get my ideas in better order") led him to the notion that "the breaking of forms by light creates colored figurations. These colored figurations are the structure of the picture, and nature is no longer a subject of description." The theory was revolutionary. Said Delaunay: "Thus far, a tree was green, a sky was blue. Now we shall paint colors because color is a goal in itself."

"More to Say." He began painting spheres of all sizes, combinations and complexity, weaving them inside each other and coloring them simply and brightly. During World War I, Portuguese police who saw him painting enormous disks on vast expanses of canvas at his seaside villa near Lisbon suspected him of drawing signals for German submarines. They found as many a gallerygoer has, that Delaunay's circles were meaningless. Delaunay's output was small: he painted only about 400 oils. When pressed to paint more pictures, he used to protest, "I can only paint when I have something to say." As he lay dying at 56, he murmured regretfully, "There's so much more I have to say;"

Last week, 16 years after his death, tribute was being paid to Painter Delaunay. Paris' National Museum of Modern Art was in the midst of a major, summer-long retrospective show of almost 200 of his oils, watercolors, drawings, lithographs. It was plain that Delaunay never realized his youthful ambition of reaching Picasso's heights, but equally plain that he had said enough to make a historical contribution to modern art.

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