Robert Delaunay

“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.”

“Painting is by nature a luminous language.”

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

“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.”

“In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.”

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

“Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable.”

“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.”

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

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

“This synchronous action then will be the Subject, which is the representative harmony.”

“The idea of the vital movement of the world and its movement is simultaneity.”

“Seeing is in itself a movement.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.”

“Nature engenders the science of painting.”

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

“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.”