Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay

Early Days: Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885, Paris – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who used Orphism, which is similar to abstract art, abstraction and cubism in his work. Delaunay concentrated on Orphism, while his later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. While he was a child, Delaunay's parents divorced, and he was raised by his uncle, in La Ronchere (near Bourges). He took up painting at an early age and, by 1903, he was producing mature imagery in a confident, impressionistic style.

Career:

In 1908, after a term in the military working as a regimental librarian, he met Sonia Terk, who he later married, though at the time she was married to a German art dealer who she would soon divorce. In 1909, Delaunay began to paint a series of studies of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. The following year, he married Terk, and the couple settled in a studio apartment in Paris, where they later had a son. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky, Delaunay joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based group of abstract artists, in 1911, and his art took a turn for the abstract.

The Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (Spain), National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), the National Galleries of Scotland, the New Art Gallery (Walsall, England), Palazzo Cavour (Turin, Italy), Palazzo Ruspoli (Rome), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are among the public collections holding works by Robert Delaunay.