robert delaunay // biography (1885-1941) / gallery / prints

/Biog./

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Robert Delaunay
Eiffel Tower

//BIOG.//
ROBERT DELAUNAY

Known as: French Artist

Date of birth: 1885

Date of death: October 25, 1941 (Montpellier, France)

Cause of death: Cancer

Robert Delaunay was the inventor of Orphic Cubism. He was mainly concerned with the emotional effects of pure colour, which may have grown out of his early preoccupation with Impressionism.

In 1911 he exhibited with the Independents in the Cubist Room, and was also invited by Kandinsky to exhibit with the Blaue Reiter group.

He married Sonia Terk (1885-1979) in 1910. She had previously been married to the German art critic Wilhelm Uhde.

Delaunay began to paint a series of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower in 1910-12, and he returned to these themes in 1924, after a seven-year stay (1914-21) in Spain and Portugal.

In 1912 he also began a series Disques and Formes circulaires cosmiques, which are among the earliest non-objective paintings.

In 1937 he was commissioned to paint vast murals - one was 9,000 square feet - for the Universal Exposition in Paris.

There are works by him in Amsterdam (Stedelijk), Dijon, Grenoble, London (Tate), Lyons, Minneapolis, Montpellier, New York (Guggenheim), Paris (Mus. d'Art Mod.) and Toledo Ohio.

Trivia:

While he was a child, Delaunay's parents divorced, and he was raised by his uncle, in La Ronchère (near Bourges).
Met Sonia Terk in 1908.
The couple had a son.
Joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based group of abstract artists, in 1911.