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Artist or Maker: ROBERT DELAUNAY 1885 - 1941

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Date: Painted in September, 1914.

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Description: ARC EN CIEL
Signed R. Delaunay (lower left); dated Septembre 1914 (on the reverse)

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Medium: Encaustic on canvas laid down on board

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Dimensions: 14 7/8 by 22 3/4 in. 38 by 58 cm

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Provenance: Collection Edouard Labouchère, Paris
Private Collection, Paris (by descent from the above)
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 30, 1955, lot 79
Private Collection, Paris
Moeller Fine Art, New York (by 1994)
Private Collection, New York

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Published: Arts, Paris, July 13-29, 1955, illustrated
Pierre Francastel and Guy Habasque, Du Cubisme à l'art abstrait: Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Robert Delaunay, Paris, 1957, no. 147, catalogued p. 274

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Notes:

Painted in 1914, Arc en ciel is an iconic example of the artist's revolutionary transition away from his earlier Cubist style towards his initiation of the Orphist movement. In a vibrant celebration of color and simplicity of form, Delaunay here depicts Paris - the city that figures most importantly in his oeuvre. He situates the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of his former Cubist deconstructions, in the distance as he turns his focus to the exploration of color, reified by the presence of a rainbow in the foreground.

Delaunay's study of color theory was influenced by the painting of Georges Seurat, whose use of contrasting and complementary colors in his pointillist compositions revolutionized painting at the end of the 19th century (see fig. 2). Delaunay expanded upon the expressive potential of color in his painting, allowing an emphasis on color to dominate over the strictures of form. Regarding the artist's inventive use of color, Max Imdahl wrote, "For Robert Delaunay, colors are the painter's actual language: 'Color is form and subject.' In addition, Delaunay considered the language of color the most human language imaginable in art. Every human being, he said, is capable of being affected by the universal language of colors, by their play, movement, chords, rhythms - in short, by those arrangements that are especially suited to man's natural inclinations" (Gustav Vriesen and Max Imdahl, Robert Delaunay: Light and Color, New York, 1967, p. 80).

Two years before he painted the present work, Delaunay wrote in a letter to Franz Marc on December 14, 1912: "I have an end, an artistic belief that is unique and that cannot be classified without risking becoming ponderous. I love poetry because it is higher than psychology. But I love painting more because I love light and clarity and it calms me. This is how I would have liked to be understood, but what does it matter after all? It is the image alone that is important..." (quoted in Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay's Series (exhibition catalogue), Guggenheim Berlin, 1997, p. 129).

Fig. 1 The artist in his studio, c. 1910
Fig. 2 Georges Seurat, Tour Eiffel, 1889, oil on canvas, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, William H. Noble Bequest Fund