Resisting abstraction: Cubism, Robert Delaunay, and the crisis of representation in early twentieth century French painting

The central concern of this dissertation is to argue that the Cubist painters were confronted with a representational crisis following their belief that vision could no longer serve as a credible basis on which to ground pictorial representation. Coming as they did in the wake of modern optical theory and late 19th-century modernist painting, the Cubists were faced with the problem of how painting could maintain a pictorial bond with the world given their conviction that the visual ground of classical representation had collapsed. Accordingly, it is my claim that the Cubist painters were compelled to develop new forms of pictorial realism that would resist the loss of painting's conventional appeals to visual appearance. Picasso, the Salon Cubists (most notably Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, André Lhote, and Henri Le Fauconnier), and Robert Delaunay each developed, I argue, distinct solutions to the problem of developing a “third way”—an alternative course between Opposing dominant accounts of Picasso's Cubism, I argue that his Cubism was intended to function as a form of “counterfeit” realism. Much in the way that a counterfeit coin gives the false appearance of value and substance, Picasso strategically sought to deceive the viewer into the impression that he was depicting the essential idea of the object. This deception, I claim, was particularly successful in terms of Picasso's reception among the Salon Cubists. Indeed, it was on the basis of this reception that Gleizes and Metzinger developed their notion of “profound realism”—a vehemently anti-visual realism that appealed to the mind and not the eye. The bulk of the dissertation, however, attempts to argue that between 1911 and 1913 Robert Delaunay sought to represent the structure of vision as it occurs as a physiological and cognitive process according to tenants of modern optical theory. This attempt culminates in what is often credited as one of First Disk. It is my claim, therefore, that even when visual appearance function.