Robert Delaunay

Coloured discs strung out diagonally across the picture are arranged so that each one leads on to the next and the movement is directed back again into the picture at the two ends. This infinitely looping effect is referenced by the painting's descriptive title, Endless Rhythm.

• Artist Robert Delaunay
• Artwork Endless Rythm
• Image size 1619 x 1302 mm
• Material Oil paint on canvas
• Date of work 1934
• Credit Purchased 1970

Robert Delaunay (1885 – 1941) was a French artist and co-founder of the orphism art movement. Born to a middle-class family in Paris, Delaunay taught himself drawing and painting from a young age. Between 1906–9 he developed a pictorial language based on colour contrast, based on the colour theories of chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Delaunay started making figure paintings before moving to architectural subjects to investigate cubist forms. He met fellow artist Sonia Terk in 1907 and they married in 1910. Delaunay contributed an article to the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) almanac, and from 1912 started to reintroduce pure colours in his work. The end of the year saw his first experiments with abstraction. The Delaunays came to develop a style which utilised forms derived from cubism and rendered in pure dynamic colour with a rhythmic, musical quality, and the writer Guillaume Apollinaire named it orphism. During WWI the Delaunays lived between Spain and Portugal, returning to Paris in 1920. Delaunay ceased working after 1938 due to illness and died while fleeing Nazi occupation.

• Product Code S23058