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Lot Essay
Executed in 1936, Robert Delaunay’s Relief orange is a luminous abstraction that features the artist’s primary motif, the disc. At the center of the present work a column of five circular forms anchors the image, from which bands of vibrant color radiate outwards. Replete with electric tonalities, the painting is incandescent, awash in lemon yellow, turquoise, bright green, and blazing orange. “Everything is roundness,” the artist noted, “sun, earth, horizons… The driving force in the picture” (quoted in S. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of Simultaneity, Ann Arbor, 1982, p. 229).
As a painter, Delaunay was largely self-taught, having begun his career working on theater sets. Initially drawn to Impressionism, his study of Post-Impressionist canvases by Paul Cezanne led him to the works of his contemporaries, including Pablo Picasso. However, Delaunay found himself simultaneously intrigued by Cubist canvases and dismayed by their lack of color. He couldn’t “bear surrendering color to form” (A. Cohen, ed., “Introduction” in The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, New York, 1978, p. xiii). Inspired by ideas put forth in Michel Eugène Chevreul’s 1830 treatise De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, Delaunay turned away from the brown, grey, and white Cubist palette to embrace the vibrancy and dynamism of chromatic juxtapositions. “I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artist were producing,” he later reflected. “I was the heretic of Cubism” (quoted in G. Hughes, “Abstraction Chez Delaunay” in L. Dickerman, ed., Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925: How A Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 74).
Together with his wife, Delaunay helped to pioneer Orphism, the avant-garde movement that grew out of Cubism but privileged light and color. The name, coined by the writer Guillaume Apolinaire, is a reference to Orpheus, the ancient Greek poet and singer. Delaunay and his colleagues were interested in the relationship between color and music and saw correlations between musical tones and pigments. With its rhythmic repetitions, Relief orange suggests its own pictorial melody. Relying upon the law of simultaneous colors—that is, how two hues placed side-by-side interact optically to produce a third—the vivid pattern of concentric circles creates a lyrical vibration in the eye of the viewer.
To create Relief orange, the artist mixed oil paint with cement, lending the canvas a three dimensional quality further underscored by its title. During the 1930s, Delaunay had shifted away from easel painting towards a more architectural idiom. In fact, architecture had long been central to his work, beginning with his Saint-Séverin series from 1909-1910. Now, however, his work truly became three-dimensional. Contemporaneous to the creation of Relief orange, Delaunay was asked to collaborate with the architect Félix Aublet on a series of decorations for the Pavillon des Chemins de Fer and the Pavillon de l’Air et de l’Aéronautique at the 1937 International Exposition. The following year, he and his wife Sonia painted an ensemble of canvases to decorate the hall of sculptures in the Salon des Tuileries in Paris. Relief orange, likewise, possesses a tactile quality that aligns with these largescale installations. The painting melds architectural and pictorial considerations so that, as Guillaume Apollinare observed, “color [becomes] itself the ideal dimension” (The Cubist Painters, translated by P. Read, Forest Row, East Sussex, 2002, p. 71).
Following the artist’s untimely death in 1941, the painting remained with his wife, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, for several decades before it was acquired by the present owner. Relief orange has been held in the same family collection for more than fifty years. The painting was featured in a spread in the December 1990-January 1991 issue of Vogue Paris.
As a painter, Delaunay was largely self-taught, having begun his career working on theater sets. Initially drawn to Impressionism, his study of Post-Impressionist canvases by Paul Cezanne led him to the works of his contemporaries, including Pablo Picasso. However, Delaunay found himself simultaneously intrigued by Cubist canvases and dismayed by their lack of color. He couldn’t “bear surrendering color to form” (A. Cohen, ed., “Introduction” in The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, New York, 1978, p. xiii). Inspired by ideas put forth in Michel Eugène Chevreul’s 1830 treatise De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, Delaunay turned away from the brown, grey, and white Cubist palette to embrace the vibrancy and dynamism of chromatic juxtapositions. “I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artist were producing,” he later reflected. “I was the heretic of Cubism” (quoted in G. Hughes, “Abstraction Chez Delaunay” in L. Dickerman, ed., Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925: How A Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 74).
Together with his wife, Delaunay helped to pioneer Orphism, the avant-garde movement that grew out of Cubism but privileged light and color. The name, coined by the writer Guillaume Apolinaire, is a reference to Orpheus, the ancient Greek poet and singer. Delaunay and his colleagues were interested in the relationship between color and music and saw correlations between musical tones and pigments. With its rhythmic repetitions, Relief orange suggests its own pictorial melody. Relying upon the law of simultaneous colors—that is, how two hues placed side-by-side interact optically to produce a third—the vivid pattern of concentric circles creates a lyrical vibration in the eye of the viewer.
To create Relief orange, the artist mixed oil paint with cement, lending the canvas a three dimensional quality further underscored by its title. During the 1930s, Delaunay had shifted away from easel painting towards a more architectural idiom. In fact, architecture had long been central to his work, beginning with his Saint-Séverin series from 1909-1910. Now, however, his work truly became three-dimensional. Contemporaneous to the creation of Relief orange, Delaunay was asked to collaborate with the architect Félix Aublet on a series of decorations for the Pavillon des Chemins de Fer and the Pavillon de l’Air et de l’Aéronautique at the 1937 International Exposition. The following year, he and his wife Sonia painted an ensemble of canvases to decorate the hall of sculptures in the Salon des Tuileries in Paris. Relief orange, likewise, possesses a tactile quality that aligns with these largescale installations. The painting melds architectural and pictorial considerations so that, as Guillaume Apollinare observed, “color [becomes] itself the ideal dimension” (The Cubist Painters, translated by P. Read, Forest Row, East Sussex, 2002, p. 71).
Following the artist’s untimely death in 1941, the painting remained with his wife, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, for several decades before it was acquired by the present owner. Relief orange has been held in the same family collection for more than fifty years. The painting was featured in a spread in the December 1990-January 1991 issue of Vogue Paris.