Robert Delaunay
1885-1941

Born in Paris, the son of a well-to-do businessman, Delaunay began painting in 1903 and exhibited his first work at the Salon d’Automne the following year.  Although his only formal training was as an apprentice with a theatrical set designer, he was heavily engaged in artistic theory and critical writing.  Initially working in a neo-Impressionist vein, he soon developed his own style that hinged on concepts introduced by Cézanne, the Analytic Cubists, and the Futurists.  In 1911, he was invited by Wassily Kandinsky to exhibit in the first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich.

Though also affiliated with the public cubists, Delaunay was the artist most closely identified with the trend known as Orphism. Coined in 1912 by the influential critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the term refers to the expressive power of color and light, as well as the correlation between color and music, such as Kandinsky had elaborated. It was also used more loosely as a catchall phrase for Apollinaire’s circle of “approved” artists, which included Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.