Sonia Delaunay-Terk / Blaise Cendrars

La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913

La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France is a work that has elements of poetry, painting and an artist’s book, all amalgamated by the lives of its two creators, Sonia Delaunay-Terk (Hradyz’k, Ukraine, 1885 – Paris, France, 1979) and Blaise Cendrars (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1887 – Paris, France, 1961), and by the story of their friendship. It was announced as “the first simultaneous book” and was published by Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, founded by Cendrars the previous year. From a formal viewpoint, the book consists of four sheets stuck end to end, which are 2 metres long when unfolded; it is folded in half vertically and then accordion-folded ten times, making a small book (18 x 10.8 cm). It is completed with a cover, decorated with Delaunay-Terk’s simultaneous contrasts.

Cendrars met the Delaunays in 1912. The first joint project on which he worked with Sonia Delaunay-Terk was Les Pâques (1912), the published edition of one of his poems, which served as a collaborative anticipation of La Prose du Transsibérien. For this second project the poet and the artist worked together from the start, as she recalled: “I was Russian, I had come from St Petersburg, and Cendrars had been there. The poem describes the journey in the Trans-Siberian and we created it in an utterly spontaneous way. Modernity was at its height and speed was the origin of everything.” At that point the Delaunays were formulating a new visual language based on a synthetic representation of nature, the physical world and modern life, in which there was a place for the emotional reactions stimulated by experience and perception.

Cendrars’s poem appears on the right-hand side of this folding book, like a cascade of printed text and colour. In 445 lines it tells the story of a journey – partly imaginary and partly autobiographical – from Moscow to Vladivostok and Paris. In 1900, Cendrars’s family visited the Exposition Universelle held in Paris that year. One of the outstanding novelties was the presentation of the Trans-Siberian railway line, which crossed Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. In 1911, Cendrars himself travelled to Moscow. Delaunay-Terk’s contribution, which occupies the left-hand side of the book but sometimes invades the area of the text, does not illustrate the poem but forms a visual equivalent through simultaneous contrasts of colour and abstract forms.

At a time and in a context when theories about abstract art were beginning to appear, Sonia Delaunay-Terk defended the theories of Simultaneism, and La Prose du Transsibérien became one of its greatest examples. In the plastic development of the account of that journey from Moscow to Paris she gave primary importance to colour and to the dynamic shapes with which it was presented, thus reducing nature to its maximum expression in terms of colour and to its minimum expression in terms of form, without using chiaroscuro or the laws of perspective.

The idea of a “travel book” can be seen in its format and characteristics. As Sonia Delaunay explained, its length of 2 metres means that it can be read vertically, and therefore it is a picture that can be hung; on the other hand, it is a book that can be folded up, reducing its size and giving it the appearance of a Chinese folding book or a road map. In fact, it has in common with Oriental books the principles of originality and uniqueness, whereby each work is treated as if it were unique, and publisher, artist, engraver and printer participate jointly in the printing process. In those books, as in La Prose du Transsibérien, there is also no conceptual or creative difference between text and image. Moreover, there is the final form of the book: an accordion fold, which, like the emaki (horizontal scroll) in Japan, appears to be the ideal form for the genre of narrative because contained in it are the rhythm and pace of reading set by the reader. Also, like the emaki, La Prose du Transsibérien uses repetitive formulas that make it easier to follow the story and identify the characters, in this case the narrator and little Jehanne of France. The line “Dis, Blaise, sommes-nous bien loin de Montmartre?” (Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?) punctuates the flow of the journey. Sonia Delaunay also uses repetitive patterns: her splashes of colour link up with each other, and at the end of the journey they conclude with the simplified shapes of the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wheel.

Cendrars uses ten different fonts, in a variety of sizes and colours. The fonts and the Simultaneist use of colour work together to convey the idea of movement: that of the train as it crosses Russia, but also the dynamic pace, vertigo and rhythm of modern life embodied by Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, the imagery of which Delaunay and Cendrars merge into the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the Great Wheel, a wheel consisting of railway carriages which was erected in the Champ de Mars for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. These two gigantic iron structures activate modern life, feeding on speed, different kinds of transport and changes of scale which, among other factors, teach a modern perception to the senses.

References

Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay: La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny / Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2011.

Maria Teresa de Freitas, Edmond Nogacki and Claude Leroy: Cendrars et les arts. Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, Valenciennes, 2002.

Antoine Sidoti: Genèse et dossier d’une polémique: La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, Blaise Cendrars–Sonia Delaunay, novembre–décembre 1912 – juin 1914. Lettres modernes Minard, Paris, 1987.

Rocío Robles Tardío, 50 Obras maestras 1900-1950, IVAM, València, 2019, p.26.