"Robert Delaunay, a painter by trade, wanted to write a book, he never finished it: this is the book that Robert Delaunay wanted to write.
This syllogism that seems paradoxical, twisted, espirálico, nevertheless arises as an evidence to go through this meeting of papers by Pierre Francastel. These recovered papers, until now unpublished in Castilian, reflect notes of Delaunay on his work, on the reflections of his friend the poet Apollinaire about Cubism and its evolution, as well as conversations with his colleagues and students and even a project for a museum of inobjective art.
If, as Souriau says, there is no work of art that is not "work to be done", finding these fragments of writing should not lead us to lament over a presumed "lack" of unity but to verify the search for a style of writing by fragments, aphorisms, by brushstrokes and touches, where perhaps the painter who writes feels the need, unconscious, to make happen something of the painting in the writing. A paved script.
The work of Robert Delaunay (who goes to duo with that of Sonia, his wife) expresses the highest point of a central mutation in the plastic arts (whose plastic development analyzes Jean-Clet Martin in the prologue), towards the synthetic, what simultaneous, the inobjective. Mutation that is expressed transversally in all fields at the beginning of the 20th century, which had its predecessors "in our revolutionary Delacroix, of which we are grandchildren", and "in the obstinate Cézanne". Mutation that leads to light and color to its primordial place, to the formal place, which creates forms and rhythms.
But the search of the Delaunay, although inscribed in a lineage, will be a radical break with the old means of expression (the old schools, but also cubism, futurism, neo-impressionism, geometric abstraction), will be the creation of new media . Hence the nickname "inobjective" that seeks to distinguish from the river of abstraction the affluent with the most burdens of future: that impelled by light and color. "