Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French painter linked to the School of Paris. Alongside his wife, Sonia Delaunay, and several others, he helped launch Orphism, a movement defined by vivid colours and geometric forms. His output grew increasingly abstract over time, and he is best remembered for his daring use of colour and his persistent drive to explore depth and tone.

Between 1912 and 1914, Delaunay’s non-representational works revolved around colour. He began his career steeped in Neo-Impressionism but later moved away from it. His ideas about colour, shaped by scientists and theorists, were largely instinctive and sometimes amounted to offhand remarks, rooted in the conviction that colour existed on its own terms, with its own expressive and formal power.

Overview

He saw painting as a purely visual discipline dependent on intellectual elements, where perception came from the impact of coloured light on the eye. These theories left a mark on many artists, including Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, members of Der Blaue Reiter, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Thomas Hart Benton, Lyonel Feininger, and numerous others. The poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire also drew on Delaunay’s colour theories to explain Orphism, a term Apollinaire himself had coined.

Early life

Delaunay was born in Paris to George Delaunay and Countess Berthe Félicie de Rose. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was raised by his aunt Marie and her husband Charles Damour in La Ronchère near Bourges. After failing his final exams and declaring his wish to become a painter, his uncle arranged for him to study decorative arts at Ronsin’s atelier in the Belleville district of Paris in 1902.

Career beginnings

At nineteen, Delaunay left Ronsin to concentrate solely on painting. He submitted six works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904. A trip to Brittany exposed him to the Pont-Aven group, and in 1906 he exhibited Brittany paintings at the 22nd Salon des Indépendants, where he met Henri Rousseau.

Around this time, he grew close to Jean Metzinger, and the two shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill’s gallery in early 1907. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles singled them out that year as Divisionists who built small, highly symbolic compositions using large, mosaic-like cubes. According to Robert Herbert, Metzinger’s Neo-Impressionist phase lasted a bit longer than Delaunay’s, peaking around 1906–1907, when the pair painted portraits of each other in prominent rectangles of pigment. Herbert notes that the solar disk in Metzinger’s Coucher de soleil no.

1 (1906–07) and in Delaunay’s Paysage au disque (1906–07) served as an homage to the decomposition of spectral light central to Neo-Impressionist colour theory. Metzinger and Delaunay, often working side by side in 1906 and 1907, developed a new Neo-Impressionist sub-style that soon proved significant for their later Cubist work. Piet Mondrian adopted a similar mosaic-like Divisionist technique around 1909, and the Futurists later incorporated the style, influenced by Gino Severini’s Parisian works from 1907 onward.

After a stint in the military as a regimental librarian, Delaunay met artist Sonia Terk in 1908; she was then married to a German art dealer, whom she soon divorced. In 1909, he began a series of studies of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. He married Terk the following year, and together with a few others they founded Orphism. The couple settled in a Paris studio apartment, where their son Charles was born in January 1911.

That same year, at Wassily Kandinsky’s invitation, Delaunay joined Der Blaue Reiter in Munich. He found success in Germany, Switzerland, and Russia, participating in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition and selling four works. His paintings sparked enthusiasm among the group, leading to an article by Erwin von Busse, “Robert Delaunay’s Methods of Composition,” in the 1912 Blaue Reiter Almanac. In February 1912, he exhibited in the second Blaue Reiter show in Munich and at the Knave of Diamonds in Moscow.

Delaunay later recalled that 1912 was a turning point. While Cubism dominated, his own paintings seemed like prisms in comparison, and he felt like a heretic among his peers, who banned colour from their palettes. He was accused of reverting to Impressionism and making decorative works, but he sensed he was close to his goal.

On 13 March 1912, his first major solo exhibition closed after two weeks at the Galerie Barbazanges. Organized by mathematician Maurice Princet, it featured forty-six works ranging from his early Divisionist period (1906–07) to his Proto-Cubist and Cubist Eiffel Tower paintings (1909–12). Apollinaire praised the show, calling Delaunay “an artist who has a monumental vision of the world.” In the 23 March 1912 issue of L’Assiette au Beurre, the first published suggestion appeared that Delaunay had broken with the Cubist group.