Robert Delaunay | Items for sale, auction results and history

Robert Delaunay was a French painter who spearheaded the art movement of Orphism in the early 1910s. Many of his best-known paintings were attempts to capture the modernity of Paris, his home city, through colour, rhythm and fragmentation.

Delaunay was born in 1885 and apprenticed as a theatre designer before deciding on a career in art. Aged 19, he contributed several works to the 1904 edition of the Salon des Indépendants. Early work was in a Divisionist manner, which owed a debt to Paul Signac.

Delaunay held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris in 1912, by which time he had already produced many ambitious groups of paintings. These included a famous series depicting the Eiffel Tower, executed in a dynamic new style which was given the name of Orphism by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Inspired in part by the writings of the 19th-century colour theoretician, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Orphism was developed by Delaunay alongside his wife and fellow artist, Sonia Terk Delaunay. Essentially, it took Cubism as its starting point, but departed from the limited palette of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso by introducing vibrant colours in carefully considered combinations.

In 1913, with series such as his ‘Disc’ and ‘Circular Form’ paintings, Delaunay removed figurative elements from his imagery, heralding a decade of work in abstraction. He’s often said to have been the first French artist to produce a completely abstract picture.

Declared unfit for military service, he spent much of World War I with Sonia in Spain and Portugal. Towards the end of the conflict, the couple were invited by Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, to design a production of Mikhail Fokine’s ballet Cléopâtre together.

In 1920, they returned to Paris, where figuration would reappear in Delaunay’s work. Subjects now included runners and (in a second set of pictures) the Eiffel Tower. One of his paintings of the Parisian landmark from this period, Tour Eiffel (1926), fetched £3,737,250 at Christie’s in 2012 — setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by Delaunay at auction.

Geometric abstraction came to dominate his work during much of the 1930s. Delaunay died in 1941, aged 56.