Robert Delaunay Quotes

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

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

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

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

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

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

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.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

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

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable

But what I attach great importance to is observation of the movement of colors. It is only in this way that I have found the laws of complementary contrast and the simultaneity of those colors that nourish the rhythm of my vision. There I find the representative essence — which does not arise from a system or an a priori theory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nature engenders the science of painting

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.

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.