Les Amoureux de Paris 1928

Curator: Delaunay’s “Les Amoureux de Paris,” created in 1928, employs printmaking to capture a raw, fragmented energy. What are your immediate impressions? Editor: The distortion! It's like a fever dream, or a Picasso deconstructed and reassembled. Those colors, so bold and disjointed—there's a potent anxiety radiating from the print. Curator: It's fascinating how Delaunay embraced abstraction to render these figures. Consider the artistic environment: interwar Paris, where experimentation with materials and techniques was exploding across all media. This print, in that context, feels like an accessible medium, reaching a broad audience in comparison to, say, oil on canvas. Editor: Right, because what's so compelling is how recognizable certain iconic visual elements remain. The elongated face, those ruby-red lips…they’re primal symbols of romance, power, and maybe even a touch of grotesque allure. What’s the dialogue between beauty and horror in the popular imagination? Delaunay seems to be questioning, rather than just presenting. Curator: And questioning the means of representation itself. By layering the colors with such looseness, and reducing form to line, shape, and tonality, Delaunay prioritizes process. The material application, the actual act of printing, becomes almost as important as the subject matter. What happens to the commodification of art when that art's process is foregrounded in the aesthetic? Editor: That’s key – it also raises questions around societal perceptions of romance itself! Look at the fragmentation of those faces, reflecting a fractured ideal. What stories are we telling ourselves about love in this modernizing metropolis? Curator: Indeed. Delaunay provides a snapshot not only of individuals, but of the collective psyche struggling to adapt and redefine traditional notions of self, love and even consumerism in this time. Editor: This deconstructed visual language gives me so much to think about in terms of inherited imagery. Curator: Agreed. A complex print to be sure!