Robert Delaunay: The Complete Story
Robert Delaunay was the painter who set Cubism on fire with colour. Where Picasso and Braque worked in greys and browns, Delaunay flooded the broken planes of Cubism with brilliant hues, inventing a movement a friend named Orphism. With his wife Sonia he made some of the first purely abstract paintings in France, built from spinning discs of colour.
He was so obsessed with the Eiffel Tower that he painted it again and again, shattered into shards.
Born: Paris, 1885
Known for: Orphism, colour abstraction, the Eiffel Tower and Window series
Died: Montpellier, France, 1941
Cubism in full colour
Delaunay started from Cubism but rejected its dull palette. He kept the fractured planes and filled them with clashing, glowing colour, believing colour itself could create form, depth and movement. See what is cubism.
The poet Apollinaire named this colour driven offshoot Orphism, after Orpheus, because it felt like painting turned into music. It was one of the first steps toward pure abstraction. See what is abstract art.
The tower and the windows
His great early obsession was the Eiffel Tower, then a daring new symbol of modern Paris. He painted it bending, tilting and exploding into fragments, seen from every angle at once.
In his Windows series the city dissolves into translucent panes of colour, and in the Simultaneous Discs he dropped the subject entirely, leaving only rings of pure hue. Painting had become colour and nothing else.
A partnership in colour
Robert worked hand in hand with his wife, the artist Sonia Delaunay. Together they pushed the same theory of simultaneous colour across painting, and Sonia carried it into textiles, fashion and design.
Their ideas spread fast. The German Blue Rider painters, including Klee and Marc, studied Delaunay closely, and his colour theory rippled out across European modern art.
The science behind the colour
Delaunay grounded his dazzling colour in theory. He studied the chemist Chevreul's law of the simultaneous contrast of colours, the idea that hues placed side by side change and intensify each other.
From that he built his own rule of simultaneity, treating the canvas almost as a colour machine. He even painted the new world of sport and flight, with works on rugby teams and pioneering aviators, fusing modern life with pure colour.
What readers ask about Robert Delaunay
What is Robert Delaunay famous for?
Founding Orphism, his Eiffel Tower and Window series, and early pure colour abstraction.
What is Orphism?
A colour driven offshoot of Cubism, named by Apollinaire, close to abstraction.
Who was Sonia Delaunay?
His wife and creative partner, who took their colour ideas into design and fashion.
When did he die?
In 1941, in the south of France.
Why the discs still spin
Delaunay proved abstraction did not have to be austere. It could be joyful, musical and drenched in colour. His spinning discs and shattered towers fed straight into later abstract art, and they still look like the moment modern painting learned to dance.
One last detail. Delaunay called his method simultaneity, the idea that colours placed together create their own light and motion. It sounds like physics, and he half meant it that way, treating the canvas as a small machine for generating energy.