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The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire called his compatriot Robert Delaunay an "Orphic Cubist" in 1912, after he had seen the bright colors of his mostly circular paintings. Warm and cold colours are contrasted and create the impression of movement in the eye of the beholder.
"Art is rhythmic," Delaunay explained. "Without visual sensitivity, there is no light, no movement."
The trained stage designer had turned to painting as an autodidact and further developed Seurat's pointillism. In his early works, square forms replaced the dots that had formed the basis of his paintings. He is thus regarded as a co-founder of Cubism. Delaunay initially used this technique to paint landscapes and townscapes. Particularly well-known works of this phase are the "Windows", which show views of the Eiffel Tower.
At this time Robert Delaunay was already a member of the Blauer Reiter in Munich, and one of his Eiffel Tower paintings was shown at its first exhibition. Delaunay was able to sell three of four of the paintings shown. Instead of continuing the successful concept, he turned to more abstract paintings, which quite deliberately no longer had any representational models. Now the series "Rythmes" was created. Delaunay's Paris apartment became the center of the French art scene. With his influential theoretical writings such as "On Light", Delaunay exerted a strong influence on the artists Franz Marc, August Macke, and Paul Klee across the German-French border. During the First World War Robert Delaunay had to flee to Spain together with his wife Sonia and worked there temporarily as a stage designer again. After the war he returned to Paris. He died in Montpellier in 1941 from cancer.
The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire called his compatriot Robert Delaunay an "Orphic Cubist" in 1912, after he had seen the bright colors of his mostly circular paintings. Warm and cold colours are contrasted and create the impression of movement in the eye of the beholder.
"Art is rhythmic," Delaunay explained. "Without visual sensitivity, there is no light, no movement."
The trained stage designer had turned to painting as an autodidact and further developed Seurat's pointillism. In his early works, square forms replaced the dots that had formed the basis of his paintings. He is thus regarded as a co-founder of Cubism. Delaunay initially used this technique to paint landscapes and townscapes. Particularly well-known works of this phase are the "Windows", which show views of the Eiffel Tower.
At this time Robert Delaunay was already a member of the Blauer Reiter in Munich, and one of his Eiffel Tower paintings was shown at its first exhibition. Delaunay was able to sell three of four of the paintings shown. Instead of continuing the successful concept, he turned to more abstract paintings, which quite deliberately no longer had any representational models. Now the series "Rythmes" was created. Delaunay's Paris apartment became the center of the French art scene. With his influential theoretical writings such as "On Light", Delaunay exerted a strong influence on the artists Franz Marc, August Macke, and Paul Klee across the German-French border. During the First World War Robert Delaunay had to flee to Spain together with his wife Sonia and worked there temporarily as a stage designer again. After the war he returned to Paris. He died in Montpellier in 1941 from cancer.