Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay was a French painter noted for his experiments with color theory and his co-founding of Orphism, along with his wife Sonia Delaunay. Drawing on the pioneering developments of Neo-Impressionism, his early work revolved around the interaction of broad passages of complementary colors. By 1909, he had painted his first Eiffel Tower that cleverly incorporated elements of Cubism. Having married Sonia Terk in 1910, the years around 1912 saw him move in a completely abstract direction with his Circular Forms series. Following his first solo show, the poet Apollinaire was to name Delaunay’s style Orphism (also known as Orphic Cubism). There was an explicit analogy drawn between its geometric shapes and the pure abstract quality of music. Having influenced both Italian Futurists and German Expressionists such as Kandinsky and Macke, the decades following the First World War saw him unable to recapture the energy and originality of his early years.