The Measures Taken

Delaunay's work is the missing link between Giacamo Balla's imprecations, Parisian Couture, and mid 60s op-art dresses. Her designs occupy a mid-point between the geometries of the sex appeal of the inorganic and more painterly, vitalist values, the 'original object' and commodity fetishism. The sexual designation of Delaunay's clothes provoked Blaise Cendrars' tribute, in which woman and clothing are diffuse and eroticised- 'on the dress she has a body'- for all Cendrars' musings on the woman's curvatures in the poem, the inanimate is as exciting. Like Stepanova's designs, the focus is on geometry and brightness, which her contemporaries wrote about in terms that would have been anathema to the austere Constructivists-. Andre Lhote writes of 'the agreeable way in which she covered the soft undulations of the human body with a geometrical architecture'- the implication being that the designs were a tease, a masquerade, and underneath the woman was as fleshy and supine as before; a tendency to titillation that perhaps puts her closer to the soft-porn monumentalism of Tamara de Lempicka. As with Lempicka, and of course Marinetti, Delaunay's geometries intersect with the automobile, as in the pictures of models and actresses in Delaunay garments posing by cars. One shows the two models in front of a long, tubular Citroen painted by the designer herself. This picture still has a certain severity about it, however- the patterns of the models' dresses and the car intersect and interlock, suggesting a kinetic fusion; the model's gaze is steely, devoid of flirtation. The look has a combination of frivolity and threat, daring you not to take it seriously.