The ''Eiffel Tower'' series of

Robert Delaunay Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstra ...

(1885 – 1941) is a cycle of paintings and drawings of the

Eiffel Tower The Eiffel Tower ( ; french: links=yes, tour Eiffel ) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Locally nicknamed ...

. Its main sequence was created between 1909 and 1912, with additional works added up to 1928. The series is considered the most prominent art depicting the iconic Paris tower as well as the most prominent work of Delaunay. The series was painted in an emerging Orphist style, an art movement co-founded by Robert and

Sonia Delaunay Sonia Delaunay (13 November 1885 – 5 December 1979) was a French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in Odessa (then part of Russian Empire), and formally trained in Russian Empire and Germany before moving to Fr ...

and

František Kupka František Kupka (23 September 1871 – 24 June 1957), also known as ''Frank Kupka'' or ''François Kupka,'' was a Czech Republic, Czech Painting, painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the Abstract ...

that added bright colors and increased abstraction to

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

. The ''Eiffel Tower'' series sits chronologically and stylistically between the artist's '' Saint-Séverin'' series and ''Windows'' series.

Eiffel Tower as symbol

Course of style over series

List of works

Legacy

Delaunay's Eiffel Tower series is evoked in architectural paintings of other iconic buildings by his contemporary, the New York artist

John Marin John Marin (December 23, 1870 – October 2, 1953) was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors. Biography Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His mother died nine days after his birth ...

, in his ''Woolworth Building, No. 31'' of 1912, and later by the Ontario artist Greg Curnoe's ''

CN Tower The CN Tower (french: Tour CN) is a concrete communications and observation tower in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Built on the former Railway Lands, it was completed in 1976. Its name "CN" referred to Canadian National, the railway c ...

'' series of the 1970s and 1980s. The 1913 artist's book '' La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France'', a collaborative work between

and the poet

Blaise Cendrars Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European mo ...

, 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. The Russian film director

Sergei Eisenstein Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, p=sʲɪrˈɡʲej mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ ɪjzʲɪnˈʂtʲejn, 2=Sergey Mikhaylovich Eyzenshteyn; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, scree ...

's appreciation of Delaunay's work informed his

Soviet montage theory Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing ('' montage'' is French for "assembly" or "editing"). It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and bro ...

, 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". 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" A 1911 painting from the series is featured in the 1980 BBC series ''

100 Great Paintings ''100 Great Paintings'' is a British television series broadcast in 1980 on BBC 2, devised by Edwin Mullins.http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/11652 13 January 2007 He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the ...

''.

References

External links

{{Commons Category, Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay Painting series 1910s paintings Architecture paintings Eiffel Tower Orphism (art) Painting in Paris Paintings by Robert Delaunay Paintings in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago Paintings in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York City)