Robert Delaunay was a French painter. He was best known for his vibratory paintings of modern life. Interested in conveying a sense of dynamism in his work, he often chose icons of human progress as motifs for his paintings.
Background
Robert Delaunay was born on April 12, 1885, in Paris, France into a prominent family descended from French aristocracy. He was the son of George Delaunay and Countess Berthe Félicie de Rose. His parents divorced when he was four years old, and he was subsequently raised by an aunt and uncle.
Education
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.
Career
A prolific painter at an early age, Delaunay showed in the Salon exhibitions, the most important official shows in France, in his early 206. 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. 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. In 1913 Delaunay 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. 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 Delaunay's 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.
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 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.
Man with a Tulip (also known as Portrait of Jean Metzinger)
1906
Views
Quotations:
"Light in Nature creates the movement of colors."
"I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them."
"First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm."
"The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness."
"On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism."
Connections
In 1910 Robert Delaunay married Sonia Terk, a Ukrainian-born French painter who became a life-long collaborator and continued to work on shared ideas long after his death in 1941. They had a son.