Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars. La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France.

A book two metres tall

In Paris in 1913 the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Sonia Delaunay made a book unlike any other. Text and image were printed on a single sheet, folded like an accordion into twenty two panels. Fully opened, it stands about two metres tall and under forty centimetres wide.

Each panel carries part of the poem on the right and a watercolour by Delaunay on the left. Her colour is mostly abstract, built from blocks and sweeps, ranging from soft pastels to indigo, vermilion, purple, yellow and green. It spills onto the right side too, filling the gaps between the stanzas.

Cendrars's poem was printed by letterpress in varied colours, sizes and typefaces. At the top, above the title, a map printed in red traces the railway route.

The book was published by Cendrars's own self financed house, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux. Because of its size, it can only be read as a book when fully open. Today it is usually shown laid out in a vitrine or hung on a wall. Tate purchased its copy in 1980.

The train and the returning question

The poem is free verse that follows the narrator's thoughts and impressions on the railway across Siberia. Its rhythm is jolting, like the train, like the scenes of death, ruin and poverty passing the window.

Between these passages comes a question, again and again, from Jehanne, the poet's companion: Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre? It is never answered. It only returns, like a refrain of longing.

The last part turns back to Paris and its liveliness: art, novels, cafés, and the two great symbols of modern life, the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wheel. These are the only figurative images in Delaunay's colour. The tower was a familiar subject in the Delaunay household, as in the paintings of her husband Robert Delaunay.

Simultaneous, not illustrated

The authors called it the first simultaneous book. The word ties to simultanism, the theory Sonia developed with Robert Delaunay: placing certain colours together to produce harmonious, lyrical effects, even a sense of movement.

As Cendrars tried to put motion into words, Delaunay sought motion through contrasting colours and dynamic shapes. Her part does not retell the poem. It is an equivalent, meant to be seen at the same time as the text. By their own account, she transcribed the poem into colour as she heard it read aloud.

Delaunay was born in Ukraine and lived in Russia and Germany before Paris, and spoke several languages with ease. Knowing the limits of language, she was drawn to the idea of a pictorial language, borderless and transnational. Colour, for her, could say what words could not.

The height of the Eiffel Tower

The authors planned an edition of one hundred and fifty. Laid end to end, the copies would have matched the height of the Eiffel Tower. The plan did not come true. Only about sixty were printed.

Even so, the book caused a sensation. It appeared in the most intense years of the Paris avant garde, amid Fauvism, Cubism and Orphism. It is now seen as a landmark of the twentieth century artist's book.

A reader must follow La Prose du Transsibérien from start to end, top to bottom. The long sheet makes the eye travel a distance, and we become aware that we too are moving. Delaunay went on exploring pictorial language all her life, in paintings, textiles, clothes, books and posters. Few of her works bring word and colour so close.