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Lot Essay
Thrumming with a vibrant modernity, Robert Delaunay’s Ville de Paris showcases the dynamism and excitement of life in the evolving metropolis during the opening decades of the Twentieth Century. Executed in 1910-1912, the present work is a vivid watercolour study for the artist’s celebrated monumental masterpiece, La ville de Paris, which is held in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. At the centre of this fragmentary vision of the city of Paris, stand three nude female figures, whose monumental angular forms are framed by a stylised view of the Seine on the left of the composition, and an abstracted Eiffel Tower to the right.
A trailblazing modernist, Delaunay embraced the changing French capital and its rapid evolution at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Born in Paris in 1885, he had seen the monumental Eiffel Tower erected on the Champs de Mars as a child, and this incredible feat of human engineering made a lasting impression on the artist, becoming a leitmotif in his oeuvre throughout his career. The tower’s geometric architectural structure was a herald of modernity, and as an interlocking iron frame standing at three hundred metres tall the unprecedented monument astounded its viewers. Initially constructed as part of the International Exposition of 1889, which was held to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, it was adapted the following year to accommodate a meteorological station, thereby furthering its public perception as an epitome of technological advancements.
The angular colour blocks and shapes that configure the cityscape in Ville de Paris echo the rhythmic geometry of the Eiffel Tower, harmoniously complementing Delaunay’s depiction of the iconic structure within the composition. On the opposite side, a boat is moored at the side of the river, its sweeping wooden sides and mast reminiscent of a bygone era, a time prior to the Machine Age that Delaunay was living in. Behind the ship, edifices of buildings are stacked on top of one another above the bridge, forming a Babylonic tower of Paris’s famed Beaux-Arts style and Haussmanian architecture. Thus, Delaunay balances the established, traditional side of Paris on the one hand, with the city’s avant-garde future on the other. Within this cityscape Delaunay inserts a rarer theme in his work, the Three Graces. The Classical motif had been embraced by many artists over time, from Raphael in the Italian Renaissance to Auguste Rodin in the preceding decades, and the iconography similarly captivated Delaunay. The artist’s representation of the Graces was inspired by a postcard of a Pompeiian fresco in the Museo Archeologico in Naples, and by depicting these renowned figures from antiquity in a stylised, fragmentary form, Delaunay furthered his invigorating synthesis of old and new.
Ville de Paris is a composition of pivotal significance in Delaunay’s oeuvre, as the artist combined elements of Cubism and abstraction. Making groundbreaking use of light and colour as technical devices, Delaunay created a number of watercolours, oil paintings, and ink drawings exploring the subject, before exhibiting one oil painting at the Salon des Indépendants in the late Spring of 1912. The importance of the composition was immediately recognised, and, upon seeing the oil painting, Guillaume Apollinaire, the influential poet and critic, immediately praised the artist as bringing about the rebirth of great art, writing that the painting ‘marks the advent of a conception of art that seemed to have been lost with the great Italian painters. And if it epitomizes all the efforts of the painter who composed it, it also epitomizes all the efforts of modern painting’ (quoted in L. Breuing, ed., Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, Boston, 1972, p. 212). The exciting modernity of the composition was also recognised by the renowned art critic and collector Maurice Raynal, who acquired the present work, likely from Delaunay himself. Raynal was a pivotal figure in the development of Cubism in France, and his writings of 1912-1913 expressed the integral concerns and objectives of the movement.
Driven by his own prismatic style, Delaunay never fully aligned with any of the artistic movements that took hold of Paris, though he did engage with his peers and predecessors in his pictorial output, setting his work in dialogue with theirs. Ville de Paris is rich in iconographic quotations, looking not only to Pompeiian wall-paintings, but to the angular figures of El Greco, the geometric Post-Impressionistic works of Paul Cezanne, as well as the pioneering poetic self-portrait of one of Delaunay’s heroes, his friend Henri Rousseau's Moi-même, portrait-paysage, from which the artist directly borrowed the motif of the ship in front of the bridge. There is also an undeniable similarity between the Cubist-inspired forms of Ville de Paris’ Three Graces and the proto-Cubist female figures in Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Balancing intellectualism and realism, Delaunay focused on light and rhythm, viewing colour as both a means of expression and structure, forging his own creative path. With its kaleidoscopic array of forms and shapes, Ville de Paris pulsates with an ambitious vitality, as Delaunay celebrates the perpetual changes of life.
A trailblazing modernist, Delaunay embraced the changing French capital and its rapid evolution at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Born in Paris in 1885, he had seen the monumental Eiffel Tower erected on the Champs de Mars as a child, and this incredible feat of human engineering made a lasting impression on the artist, becoming a leitmotif in his oeuvre throughout his career. The tower’s geometric architectural structure was a herald of modernity, and as an interlocking iron frame standing at three hundred metres tall the unprecedented monument astounded its viewers. Initially constructed as part of the International Exposition of 1889, which was held to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, it was adapted the following year to accommodate a meteorological station, thereby furthering its public perception as an epitome of technological advancements.
The angular colour blocks and shapes that configure the cityscape in Ville de Paris echo the rhythmic geometry of the Eiffel Tower, harmoniously complementing Delaunay’s depiction of the iconic structure within the composition. On the opposite side, a boat is moored at the side of the river, its sweeping wooden sides and mast reminiscent of a bygone era, a time prior to the Machine Age that Delaunay was living in. Behind the ship, edifices of buildings are stacked on top of one another above the bridge, forming a Babylonic tower of Paris’s famed Beaux-Arts style and Haussmanian architecture. Thus, Delaunay balances the established, traditional side of Paris on the one hand, with the city’s avant-garde future on the other. Within this cityscape Delaunay inserts a rarer theme in his work, the Three Graces. The Classical motif had been embraced by many artists over time, from Raphael in the Italian Renaissance to Auguste Rodin in the preceding decades, and the iconography similarly captivated Delaunay. The artist’s representation of the Graces was inspired by a postcard of a Pompeiian fresco in the Museo Archeologico in Naples, and by depicting these renowned figures from antiquity in a stylised, fragmentary form, Delaunay furthered his invigorating synthesis of old and new.
Ville de Paris is a composition of pivotal significance in Delaunay’s oeuvre, as the artist combined elements of Cubism and abstraction. Making groundbreaking use of light and colour as technical devices, Delaunay created a number of watercolours, oil paintings, and ink drawings exploring the subject, before exhibiting one oil painting at the Salon des Indépendants in the late Spring of 1912. The importance of the composition was immediately recognised, and, upon seeing the oil painting, Guillaume Apollinaire, the influential poet and critic, immediately praised the artist as bringing about the rebirth of great art, writing that the painting ‘marks the advent of a conception of art that seemed to have been lost with the great Italian painters. And if it epitomizes all the efforts of the painter who composed it, it also epitomizes all the efforts of modern painting’ (quoted in L. Breuing, ed., Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, Boston, 1972, p. 212). The exciting modernity of the composition was also recognised by the renowned art critic and collector Maurice Raynal, who acquired the present work, likely from Delaunay himself. Raynal was a pivotal figure in the development of Cubism in France, and his writings of 1912-1913 expressed the integral concerns and objectives of the movement.
Driven by his own prismatic style, Delaunay never fully aligned with any of the artistic movements that took hold of Paris, though he did engage with his peers and predecessors in his pictorial output, setting his work in dialogue with theirs. Ville de Paris is rich in iconographic quotations, looking not only to Pompeiian wall-paintings, but to the angular figures of El Greco, the geometric Post-Impressionistic works of Paul Cezanne, as well as the pioneering poetic self-portrait of one of Delaunay’s heroes, his friend Henri Rousseau's Moi-même, portrait-paysage, from which the artist directly borrowed the motif of the ship in front of the bridge. There is also an undeniable similarity between the Cubist-inspired forms of Ville de Paris’ Three Graces and the proto-Cubist female figures in Pablo Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Balancing intellectualism and realism, Delaunay focused on light and rhythm, viewing colour as both a means of expression and structure, forging his own creative path. With its kaleidoscopic array of forms and shapes, Ville de Paris pulsates with an ambitious vitality, as Delaunay celebrates the perpetual changes of life.