Robert Delaunay

Delaunay took inspiration from a photographic postcard of Paris for this colourful, expressive painting. The form of the Eiffel Tower can be seen amongst the flat areas of colour. The postcard showed the tower overlooking the rooftops of the city, and Delaunay’s bright colours evoke the intense light and dynamic interactions of the city. The Eiffel tower had been built 25 years before Delaunay made this painting, and it was still a symbol of modernity.

• Artist Robert Delaunay
• Artwork Windows Open Simultaneously
• Image size 457 x 375 mm
• Material Oil paint on canvas
• Date of work 1912
• Credit Purchased 1967

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 S23057