Robert Delaunay Quotes

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.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

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

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.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

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.

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

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.

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

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Nature engenders the science of 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.

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

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

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

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

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

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

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.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.