DELAUNAY, Robert (Paris, 1885 – Montpellier, 1941)
Born in Paris on 12 Arpil 1885, after an apprenticeship as a theatrical set decorator, Robert Delaunay decided to devote himself to painting around 1903–05. He studied the works of the Impressionists, and of Gauguin and Seurat, visited exhibitions and established friendships with figures such as “le Douanier” Rousseau and Metzinger (later a Cubist theorist). It was at this time that he exhibited his first works at the Salon and read Chevreul’s 1839 scientific treatise, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, which greatly influenced his later pictorial vocabulary.
Delaunay was enormously influenced by the work of Gauguin, particularly in the Great Exhibitions of 1906, and he participated in the beginnings of Cubism and started a series of paintings entitled Small Town, Eiffel Tower and Saint-Séverin. In 1910 he married Sonia Terk,
a young painter originally from Russia, and from that moment their lives as well as their careers were to be inextricably linked. In 1911 their son Charles (the future jazz historian) was born.
By 1912–1913 Delaunay had already begun to move away from Cubism and produced his first abstract works, Windows and Circular Shapes, in respect of which his close friend Apollinaire coined the word Orphism. This term came from one of Apollinaire’s poems and was intended to be applied to those artists whose work was characterised by a “luminous language”. At this time the painting entitled The City of Paris had great success at the Salon des Indépendants and Delaunay became friends with Le Fauconnier
and Gleizes. At Kandinsky’s request, after recommendations from Marc and Macke (who had visited Delaunay’s studio in Paris the year before), in 1913 Delaunay took part in a Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich. It was here that he met Klee and Herwarth Walden, the owner of the Galerie Der Sturm. When war broke out, the Delaunays were on holiday in Spain and they did not return to France until 1920, living first in Portugal and then in Spain. They met Diaghilev, Massine and Stravinsky in Madrid. Once back in Paris, they mixed mostly with writers, in particular those close to the Dada and Surrealist movements, including Breton, Tzara and Maiakovsky, and their house in Paris became an important meeting place. In 1922 the Galerie Paul Guillaume held a major one-man show of Robert’s work. His definitive return to abstract art occurred in 1930 with Joie de Vivre and Rhythms, and the same year he also undertook his first experiments with new materials in Reliefs.
The first important public purchases of work from his early period occurred between 1935 and 1936. The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris bought three paintings (including The City of Paris), the Petit Palais acquired one and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum ten. On the occasion of the 1937 Exposition Internationale d’Arts et Techniques in Paris, Delaunay was part of a group of artists who decorated the Palais d’Air and the Palais des Chemins de Fer. In 1938 he completed his last significant works, Rhythms 1–2–3, which were to adorn the sculpture room in the Tuilleries. After several years of illness, he died on 25 August 1941 at Montpellier.
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