Eiffel Tower (Delaunay series)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Eiffel_trocadero_i.jpg/220px-Eiffel_trocadero_i.jpg)
The Eiffel Tower series of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) is a cycle of paintings and drawings of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was built by Gustave Eiffel.
The series was painted in an emerging Orphist style, an art movement co-founded by Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka that added bright colors and increased abstraction to Cubism. The Eiffel Tower series sits chronologically and stylistically between the artist's Saint-Séverin series and Windows series.
Eiffel Tower as symbol
[edit]![]() | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (May 2022) |
Course of style over series
[edit]List of works
[edit]Year | Image | Title | Collection |
---|---|---|---|
1909–12, original series | |||
1909 | ![]() |
La Tour à l'univers s'adresse | Philadelphia Museum of Art |
1909–10 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe |
1910 | ![]() |
La tour aux rideaux | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen |
1910 | ![]() |
Tour Eiffel aux arbres | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum |
1911 | ![]() |
Tour Eiffel | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum |
1911 | ![]() |
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower | Art Institute of Chicago[1] |
1911–12 | ![]() |
La Tour Rouge | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum |
1911–12 | ![]() |
Les trois Grâces (étude pour "La Ville de Paris") | Private collection |
1912 | ![]() |
La Ville de Paris | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris |
1920s, return to theme | |||
1922 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel et jardin du champs de mars | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
1922 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
1924 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Dallas Museum of Art |
1926 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris |
1926 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris |
1926–28 | ![]() |
La Tour Eiffel | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum |
Legacy
[edit]Delaunay's Eiffel Tower series is evoked in architectural paintings of other iconic buildings by his contemporary, the New York artist John Marin, in his Woolworth Building, No. 31 of 1912,[2] and later by the Ontario artist Greg Curnoe's CN Tower series of the 1970s and 1980s.[3]
The 1913 artist's book La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, a collaborative work between Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise Cendrars, forms an epic narrative of a Trans-Siberian Railway journey that concludes in Paris at a Simultanist Eiffel Tower. They had announced a plan to sell 150 copies of the book, which would equal in height the Tower itself.[4]
The Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's appreciation of Delaunay's work informed his Soviet montage theory, as he imagined developing cinematically "a dynamic fusion of a series, moving past the spectator, of those hundred views of the Eiffel Tower" rather than a "summation within a single canvas".[5]
Cendrars's 1924 essay on Robert Delaunay describes his feminization of the Tower, and Sonia Delaunay described the Eiffel Tower as her husband's "Eve future" [6]
A 1911 painting from the series is featured in the 1980 BBC series 100 Great Paintings.
References
[edit]- ^ "Champs de Mars: The Red Tower".
- ^ Panzera, Lisa (2000-01-01). "Italian Futurism and Avant-Garde Painting in the United States". In Berghaus, Günther (ed.). International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Walter de Gruyter. p. 233. ISBN 9783110156812.
- ^ Barrio, Jose L. (1978). "Greg Curnoe: A Proposed Referendum and Five Series". The CCCA Canadian Art Database. artscanada. Archived from the original on 2022-04-12. Retrieved 2015-11-19.
- ^ Affron, Matthew (2012-01-01). "Contrasts of Colors, Contrasts of Words". In Affron, Leah (ed.). Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art. p. 83. ISBN 9780870708282.
- ^ Neat, Timothy (2015-10-12). "Invisible Cinema: John Berger, Play Me Something, and Walk Me Home". In Hertel, Ralf; Malcolm, David (eds.). On John Berger: Telling Stories. Brill Rodopi. p. 301. ISBN 9789004308114.
- ^ Gronberg, Tag (2000-01-01). "Deco Venus". In Arscott, Caroline; Scott, Katie (eds.). Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality. Manchester University Press. p. 147. ISBN 9780719055225.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)