Eiffel Tower (Delaunay series)
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
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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 | _c1911-1912.jpg)
|
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 | .jpg)
|
La Tour Eiffel et jardin du champs de mars | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
| 1922 | .jpg)
|
La Tour Eiffel | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
| 1924 | .jpg)
|
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.
