Robert Delaunay

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Eiffel Tower, an oil painting on canvas by Robert Delaunay from … (credit: Deposited by Emanuel Hoffmann-Foundation in Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; photograph, Hans Hinz)

(born April 12, 1885, Paris, Fr. — died Oct. 25, 1941, Montpellier) French painter. He spent his early career as a part-time designer of stage scenery and came under the influence of Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. In 1909 – 11 his colour experiments culminated in a series of paintings of the Eiffel Tower, which combined fragmented Cubist forms with dynamic movement and vibrant colour. The introduction of bright colour to Cubism — a style that came to be known as Orphism — distinguished his work from that of the more orthodox Cubist painters and influenced the artists of Der Blaue Reiter. With his wife, the Ukrainian-born painter and textile designer Sonia Terk Delaunay (1885 – 1979), he painted abstract mural decorations for the 1937 Paris Exposition.

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(b Paris, 12 April 1885; d Montpellier, 25 Oct 1941). French painter, printmaker and writer. Taking Cubism as one of his points of departure, he first developed a vocabulary of colour planes only distantly dependent on observed motifs, and by the 1930s he had arrived at a purely self-sufficient language of geometric forms. He remained active as a theoretician until the end of his life, leaving a legacy of influential writings on the development of abstract art.

Part of the Delaunay family

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Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) was a French painter often credited with painting the first abstract canvases based on theories of pure color around the year 1913.

Robert Delaunay was born in Paris on April 12, 1885, into a prominent family descended from French aristocracy; his mother used the title "Countess." His parents divorced when he was four years old, and he was subsequently raised by an aunt and uncle. An uninspired student, Delaunay did not pursue an education and instead apprenticed himself to a theater designer. Unlike most of the young painters of his generation, he had no formal art training. In 1910 he married Sonia Terk, a Russian painter who became a life-long collaborator and continued to work on shared ideas long after his death from cancer in 1941.

A prolific painter at an early age, Delaunay showed in the Salon exhibitions, the most important official shows in France, in his early 20s. He incorporated much of the restlessness of art during the first decade of the 20th century in his early work, passing through a Pointillist, a Nabi, then a Fauve phase. It was around 1912 that Delaunay came to believe that light could be expressed as pure color independent of any objective content. He declared that "color alone is form and content."

This idea ran counter to the Cubist ideas of Picasso and Braque, who were more interested in the analysis of physical form than in light. Cubist paintings between 1907 and 1913 are static and sculptural without emphatic color, whereas Delaunay's paintings of the same period are fluid and multi-chromatic. He began a series of paintings of the Eiffel Tower rendered in swinging arcs of color that suggest movement. The Cubists accused Delaunay of reverting to the optical effects of Cezanne, while Delaunay maintained that he was doing "pure" paintings that expressed the dynamism of the 20th century.

In 1913 he began a series of paintings of colored discs that have no reference to any object and are considered hallmark paintings in the evolution of abstract or nonobjective art. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire called Delaunay's new style of abstract work "Orphism" in reference to the musician Orpheus in Greek mythology whose music had magical powers. Early abstract artists found strong connections between their work and music because neither depended on the imitation of phenomena found in the natural world.

Delaunay's belief in the primacy of color over form placed him closer in temperment to the German Expressionist painters than to Cubists working in France. In 1911 he exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group organized around Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and he also showed in the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. He was caught in Spain at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and he stayed there and in Portugal with his wife and their son until 1921.

During this time he met Russian exiles Sergei Diaghilev, producer and choreographer of the famed Ballets/Russes, and the composer Igor Stravinsky. In 1918 the Delaunays designed costumes and decor for a Diaghilev production of Cleopatra. His wife worked along lines similar to her husband, applying their theories of color simultaneity - the interaction of colors in relationship to one another - to design as well as painting. She made clothing, fabric, wall-covering, upholstery, and furniture covered with patches of color. She had an automobile painted in this manner which was considered a shocking and innovative extension of an idea from the avant-garde into the world-at-large.

Back in Paris after the war Delaunay resumed painting in a semi-figurative manner somewhat in contradiction to his early theories of nonobjective art. He exhibited little during this time, and it is considered a period of regression in his work. He also painted frescos for which he invented new techniques for mixing additives to paint to create unusual textures and colors. He worked with painter Fernand Leger on murals for the International Exposition of Decorative Arts and he designed film and stage sets. He became friendly with artist Jean Arp and poet Tristan Tzara. In his 30s he continued to do commissioned wall paintings, completing a mural at the Palais des Chemin de Fer and at the Salon des Tuileries.

Delaunay's career as a painter was meteoric. He was a prominent spokesperson for a specific point of view at a time of much artistic fermentation in the years preceding World War I. Unlike such other highly regarded artists of that period as Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky, he did not sustain the innovations that propelled him into the limelight in his youth into his later work. As a result, his painting seems uneven after 1920 and his most significant work in the 1930s was murals and public commissions, an extension of his wife's early experiments. After his death in 1941 she continued to work prodigiously, designing books, tapestries, and fabrics, as well as interior decors and murals. Her work, as an extension of her husband's theories and early discoveries, helped to establish his reputation as a significant painter of the 20th century.

Further Reading

There are a number of good books written on the work of both Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Gustav Vrieson's Robert Delaunay: light and color (1969) is a standard, as is Robert Delaunay (1975), translated from the French with a text by Bernard Dorival. A more recent monograph, Robert Delaunay, appeared in 1976. There are numerous catalogs of exhibitions in Europe but none in English. Several works on Sonia stand out. One is a catalog Sonia Delaunay: rhythms and colors (1972) with text by Jacques Remase, and a second is Sonia Delaunay (1975) by Arthur Cohen.

Delaunay, Robert (1885-1941). French painter who pursued la peinture pure in his paintings, theoretical writings, and lectures. The heavy paint layer of early works, a pulsating mosaic of touches, ceded to his invention of Orphism (brighter palette, a kaleidoscope of shifting planes, zones of warm and cool colour, lyricism channelling kinetic energy). He executed series paintings (the city, windows, the Eiffel Tower); he combined time and movement, tradition and invention, in La Ville de Paris (1910-12); and his ‘simultaneous’ compositions, with light and colour creating form, embrace movement and modernity. Apollinaire, who lived with the Delaunays briefly, and whose tastes corresponded, coined the term ‘Orphism’, matching it poetically in ‘Les Fenêtres’.

— Helen Beale

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Champs de Mars. La Tour rouge. 1911. Art Institute of Chicago.

Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon, oil on canvas painting by Robert Delaunay, 1912-13, Museum of Modern Art, (New York City)

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Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885, Paris – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who used Orphism, which is similar to abstract art, abstraction and cubism in his work. Delaunay concentrated on Orphism, while his later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. While he was a child, Delaunay's parents divorced, and he was raised by his uncle, in La Ronchère (near Bourges). He took up painting at an early age and, by 1903, he was producing mature imagery in a confident, impressionistic style.

In 1908, after a term in the military working as a regimental librarian, he met Sonia Terk, who he later married, though at the time she was married to a German art dealer who she would soon divorce. In 1909, Delaunay began to paint a series of studies of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. The following year, he married Terk, and the couple settled in a studio apartment in Paris, where they later had a son. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky, Delaunay joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based group of abstract artists, in 1911, and his art took a turn for the abstract.

The outbreak of World War I found Delaunay and his wife vacationing in Spain, and they settled with friends in Portugal for the duration of the conflict. During this period, the couple took on several jobs designing costumes for the Madrid Opera, and Sonia Delaunay started a fashion design business. After the war, in 1921, they returned to Paris. Delaunay continued to work in a mostly abstract style. During the 1937 World Fair in Paris, Delaunay participated in the design of the railway and air travel pavilions. When World War II erupted, the Delaunays moved to the Auvergne, in an effort to avoid the invading German forces. Suffering from cancer, Delaunay was unable to endure being moved around, and his health deteriorated. He died from cancer on 25 October 1941 in Montpellier.

The Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (Spain), National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), the National Galleries of Scotland, the New Art Gallery (Walsall, England), Palazzo Cavour (Turin, Italy), Palazzo Ruspoli (Rome), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are among the public collections holding works by Robert Delaunay.

Jazz expert Charles Delaunay is Robert and Sonia's son. Charles continued to devote his pieces to his mother and father after they were deceased.

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