tour eiffel robert delaunay cycle 2

Robert Delaunay

La Tour Eiffel

Robert Delaunay (1885, France - 1941, France)

An emblem of modernity, the metal tower built by Gustave Eiffel in 1889 fascinated Delaunay and runs through all his work. After breaking it down in a major Cubist series in the early 191Os, the artist glorifies the Eiffel Tower in a range of flamboyant colours underscored by a powerful seen-from-below effect, often adopted by photographers at the time. The latticed framework of the edifice soars skyward like a bridge. The colours of the geometrical blacks adorning the tower give this painting a decidedly decorative look.

• Paris (ville)
• Tour Eiffel (Paris) (représentée)
• forme géométrique

Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Hélène Mauri/Dist. RMN-GP /Dist. RMN-GP

Image reference : 4Y03736

Image presentation : l'Agence Photo de la RMN

Detailed description

By the same artist.

Esquisse pour la décoration de l'escalier du Palais des Chemins de fer…

Entrée du Hall des réseaux

Le poète Philippe Soupault

Félix Aublet, Robert Delaunay

Élévation et croquis

Portrait d'Henri Carlier

La Verseuse

1936 - 1937

La Madeleine et les Boulevards

Croquis de femme en robe longue

Manège de cochons

Art et architecture en Europe 1870-…

Images et imaginaires de l'architecture

La Donation Sonia et Charles Delaunay

à l'Atelier Brancusi

Bibliography

External links.

La collection du Musée national d’art moderne

• Corrections

What Made Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower Paintings So Famous?

Cubist and Orphist pioneer Robert Delaunay made countless studies of the Eiffel Tower. We look through the reasons why they are so important.

Robert Delaunay was one of the most important artists of the 20 th century. A Cubist and Orphist pioneer, he lived much of his life in Paris , as the city surged and became a cultural mecca in the wake of the industrial revolution. Of all the subjects Delaunay painted, the Eiffel Tower was his most enduring – he made a major series of works based on the Eiffel Tower motif from 1909-1912, and returned to the subject in an entirely new way between 1920 and 1930. But what was it about the tower that so captured his imagination, and kept him hooked for so much of his life? We examine the many reasons for Delaunay’s fascination with the great tower of Paris, which he called the “barometer of [his] art.”

A Symbol of Modern Paris

For Robert Delaunay and many modernists, the Eiffel Tower represented the pinnacle of human achievement during the time in which they were living . Designed by Gustave Eiffel and erected in 1889 for the Paris World Fair, the Eiffel Tower was then the tallest building in the world, soaring over the classical city of Paris with its looming latticed design. Not everyone loved the tower – some even lobbied for its removal – but many saw the great tower as a potent symbol of modernity, representing the pinnacle of human achievement so far.

It came to symbolize Parisian innovation as the city stepped forward into the modern age, a proud beacon of progress, aspiration and invention. For Delaunay, the rise of the machine age was something to be celebrated and embraced, as humanity entered a shiny new era. The Eiffel Tower encapsulated Delaunay’s positive emotions about the dawn of the machine age, as his wife and fellow artist Sonia Delaunay wrote, “The Tower was his liberated muse, his Eve of the future … The Tower addresses the universe.”

A Launchpad for Cubist Abstraction

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As Robert Delaunay became more adventurous with his art, embracing the rising avant-garde style of Cubism , he explored how the Eiffel Tower could become a launchpad for playing with ideas around fragmentation, dislocation and deconstruction. In his early series of Eiffel Tower paintings, made between 1909 and 1912, Delaunay painted the Eiffel Tower as a series of broken, faceted forms that seem to dissolve into one with the city around it.

He was tireless in his studies of the tower, as Mark Roesenthal, author of Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series , explains: “[he] studied it from above, and below, inside and out, from near and far, by day and by night. He absorbed its every mood, perspective, and light effect.” Over time, Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower paintings became more and more abstract, as the tower form disintegrated, and Delaunay increasingly focused on ideas around structure, form and light.

A Focal Point for Studying Light, Color and Movement

By the 1920s Robert Delaunay had moved away from Cubism and instead embraced the style of Orphism , in which he broke real world subjects into vivid, symphonic patchworks of color and light, that suggest energy, movement and sensation. In his later Eiffel Tower series of 1920 to 1930, Delaunay demonstrates this stylistic shift, with geometric panels of color that interlock together into flat, quilt-like patterns. In many of his later Eiffel Tower paintings Robert Delaunay took a different viewpoint, looking down on the tower from the air, onto the ground below.

He based these paintings on aerial photographs taken by Andre Schelchner and Albert Omer-Decugis in 1909 from the basket of a hot air balloon. While Delaunay was still fascinated by the tower as the symbol of French progress and innovation, he also demonstrated how its structural shape was the ideal framework on which to build a bold and innovative new language of pure abstraction.

What Are the Differences Between Orphism and Cubism?

By Rosie Lesso MA Contemporary Art Theory, BA Fine Art Rosie is a contributing writer and artist based in Scotland. She has produced writing for a wide range of arts organizations including Tate Modern, The National Galleries of Scotland, Art Monthly, and Scottish Art News, with a focus on modern and contemporary art. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art. Previously she has worked in both curatorial and educational roles, discovering how stories and history can really enrich our experience of art.

Frequently Read Together

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Robert Delaunay's Eiffel Tower

Robert Delaunay, "Eiffel Tower," 1924. Oil on Canvas, 161.6 cm x 96.8 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis.

Robert Delaunay, an artist who lived in Paris between 1900 and 1940, is best known for his paintings the  Eiffel Tower Series . He painted the first series between 1909 and 1912 and a second series between 1920 and 1930. [i]  This painting from 1924 is from the second series where Delaunay paints in a style known as Orphic Cubism, where color is used to envision form through planes and lines of contrasting colors. As Delaunay wrote in his journal, the Eiffel Tower was the “barometer of [his] art,” a symbol of Paris and its success as a modern haven. [ii]  Delaunay saw the Eiffel Tower as the pride of France as the country stepped boldly into the modern age. [iii]  Like other artists that relayed their urban experiences by painting cityscapes, Delaunay used the structure as a template upon which he conveyed his imagined visions and perceptions of Paris. Unlike the German Expressionists’ typically chaotic and dark paintings of urban scenes, Delaunay’s post-war Eiffel Tower series celebrates the enthusiastic feeling for progress that the modern metropolis would allow. By 1924 Paris was a center of innovation and recreating the Eiffel Tower as he imagined it allowed Delaunay to communicate his own optimism for modern life.

Georges Seurat, "Tour Eiffel,"Oil on Canvas. 24 x 15 cm. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco. 

Robert Delaunay, influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists, transformed the expression of color on canvas by painting the effect of “simultaneous contrasting colors.” [iv]  Color, more than any visual element of a painting, can engage the sensation of sight and activate the eye of the viewer. Beginning in the 1880s in Germany and France, artists began manipulating color outside of its accepted purpose as a pictorial element that mirrored pigment, light, and color as it was in reality. Georges Seurat took a scientific approach in applying color theory with his pointillist paintings, while later on the Fauvists began creating imagined forms with flat planes of bright colors. Comparing  Eiffel Tower  to Seurat’s painting of the monument from 1889, it is apparent that Delaunay’s particular use of certain colors and careful placement thereof to mimic the effects of light on the monument is similar to Seurat’s scientific use of color theory (Figure 1). However, Delaunay has flipped Seurat’s notion of capturing light by varying only application and intensity of a realistic color. Instead, he sought to capture light only through bold and imaginitive Fauvist-inspired pigment.

Robert Delaunay, "Eiffel Tower," 1910. Oil on Canvas, 20 cm x 16 cm. Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

The more Delaunay painted the Eiffel tower, the more abstracted it became. According to Mark Roesenthal, author of  Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay's Series , by the time Delaunay painted the monument in 1924, the artist had “…studied it from above, and below, inside and out, from near and far, by day and by night. He absorbed its every mood, perspective, and light effect.” [v]  Over years of study, he was able to conquer the structure by mastering perspective of the tower from all possible dimensions and aspects. Initially, as in  Eiffel Tower  1910, (Figure 2),   Delaunay focused on deconstructing the tower in its space so that it emerges from a variety of elements, standing tall in a swirling environment. He paints in Cubist style, choosing to deconstruct via lines and shapes rather than by color. Only once he was able to branch away from Cubism around 1913 and focus on color as the pictorial device to fragment did Delaunay pioneer Orphic Cubism. By his painting in 1924, his shift in style is evidenced by the Eiffel Tower no longer being a singular form emerging from fragmented space but rather as the object of fragmentation itself. As the viewer comes closer to the painting, the Eiffel Tower loses its sense of solidness as a whole form and instead becomes a grid work of shapes and lines. Thus, Delaunay’s fixated study of the Eiffel Tower during his life was due to both an artistic fascination with its form as well as to his perception of the tower as a shining beacon of France’s strength in progress. 

View of the Eiffel Tower and Champs de Mars, Paris . Photograph reproduced in Mark Rosenthanl, Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series (New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 61.

In  Eiffel Tower,  painted in 1924, an aerial perspective of the tower and the range of colors used make it seem near at hand, while simultaneously magnificent in its awesome size and vertically stretching orientation. The aerial perspective on the Eiffel Tower creates an aura of grandiosity and heavenward verticality. The top of the tower is cut off and the entire piece framed as if viewed from a higher window. Delaunay paints as if the observer was looking down on the entirety of Paris through a window but could only see the Eiffel Tower, communicating the dominance of the Eiffel Tower over the entirety of Paris as one observes it from above. A contemporary photograph of the monument at the time period from the same perspective illustrates how vertical and domineering the tower truly looked from above (Figure 3). This mobile perspective in  Eiffel Tower  also implicates the viewer as an observer and the artist as the imaginer, emphasizing that Delaunay’s imagination has ordered the visual elements at his disposal to paint  Eiffel Tower .

The range of contrasting colors, Delaunay’s main focus, creates an optical effect where every color zone is pushed forward or backward in space by its neighbor. Delaunay wrote about this idea of simultaneous colors (or simultaneity) as  “…a certain combination of colors, in harmonic contrast with each other, can reproduce the movement of light.” [vi]  Delaunay realized that light was “actualized through color” and thus when contrasting colors to intensify them one could capture the movement of light that occurred within each hue. [vii]   Eiffel Tower  combines many complementary and dissonant colors, ultimately each working together so that color has taken over the function of solid form. Additionally, light seems to be reverberating throughout the entire canvas because of the ordered layering of colors. The flatness of the painting only becomes apparent upon close viewing, because the juxtaposition of darker colors with passages of white creates a sculptural sense of recession into space. The colors in  Eiffel Tower  communicate the vibrancy and dynamism of the urban environment in Paris.

By being “imaginative, not imitative” Delaunay transforms the image of a recognizable monument to a personally relevant image conveying the energy of urbanism and modernity. [viii]  The Eiffel Tower was a universal symbol for human growth in the metropolis and a personal connection to innovation Delaunay sought over the course of his career. His pioneering of Orphism culminates the century-long exploration by artists to extract the properties of color and manipulate them to give new meaning to it as a communicator of sensation and thought. In contrast to German Expressionists, Delaunay forgoes personal relevancy to his subject matter in favor of more aesthetic exploration. Meidner and Kirchner could not truthfully embrace a nationalistic identity at a time when Berlin seemed to be collapsing. Instead, they sought to transform thoughts of pessimism on modernity and personal visions of ruin into expressive images of city life and the cityscape of Berlin. Delaunay’s work reflects French optimism in the immediate years after its victory over Germany in World War I; hence he creates a nationalistic piece with a monument to urbanism in  Eiffel Tower .   

[i]  Gustav Vriesen and Max Imadahl,  Robert Delaunay: Light and Color  (New York, H. N. Abrams, 1969), 66.

[ii]  Vriesen and Imadahl,  Robert Delaunay: Light and Color . 71.

[iii]  William Thompson, “The Symbol of Paris: Writing the Eiffel Tower,”  The French Review : 1130-40, accessed February 1, 2015.

[iv]  Mark Roesenthal, “Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series,” 77.

[v]  Roesenthal, “Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series”

[vi]  Herschel Chipp, “Orphism and Color Theory,”  The Art Bulletin:  55-63, accessed February 1, 2015.

[vii]  Roesenthal, “Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series” 89.

[viii]  Vriersen and Imadahl,  Robert Delaunay: Light and Color , 88.

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La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower)

Robert delaunay 3958, museum folkwang essen, germany.

With his depiction of the Eiffel Tower , the symbol of Paris built in 1889 as a spectacular example of French engineering, Robert Delaunay produced a shocking scenario of the decline and fall of the modern world. His admiration for industrial progress contrasts with his pictorial destruction of the architectural construction, to the point of a formal dissolution of the motif. Its only remaining relation to the city is the view of the curved paths on the Champ de Mars . The tower itself, exploded into schematic pieces, traverses the painting diagonally, its tip covered by prism-like clouds. Delaunay dedicated this painting, part of a series of about 15 of the Eiffel Tower, to his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote ardent poems and texts on the artist's work and on the modern metropolis of Paris.

• Title: La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower)
• Creator: Robert Delaunay
• Creator Lifespan: 1885/1941
• Provenance: Acquired in 1964 with the support of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
• Type: Painting
• Rights: © Museum Folkwang
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Höhe: 130 cm
• Collection: Painting, Sculpture, Media Art
• Breite: 97 cm

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The Eiffel Tower

Robert Delaunay French

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Artwork Details

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Title: The Eiffel Tower

Artist: Robert Delaunay (French, Paris 1885–1941 Montpellier)

Medium: Lithograph

Dimensions: Sheet: 11 in. × 8 15/16 in. (28 × 22.7 cm)

Classification: Prints

Credit Line: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1975

Accession Number: 1975.606.6

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La tour Eiffel

Dans le cadre de l’étude du XIXème siècle en histoire (voir ici ), on peut mener un travail en histoire des arts sur ce monument français qu’est la tour Eiffel.

Présentation

Tous les élèves la connaissent mais il es utilise de rappeler où elle est située et de quand date sa construction.

Voici un diaporama très bien fait trouvé sur internet (malheureusement, sans référence, je n’ai pu en retrouver l’origine) et des images séquentielles chez mitsouko , bien pratiques, même si on n’a pas de CP.

Un autre diaporama chez Sanleane avec la fiche d’histoire des arts qui l’accompagne.

Arts visuels

Je vous propose un travail à la manière de Delaunay (voir article ici )

Après une présentation d’un des tableaux de Robert Delaunay, je fournis aux élèves une image de tour Eiffel en noir et blanc format A4. Ils doivent ensuite travailler sur le fond avec une association de cercles de toutes tailles à mettre ensuite en couleurs.

Comme c’est un travail assez long, je propose parfois une version plus petite sur une fiche d’histoire des arts qui peut prendre place dans leur cahier d’explorateur (voir ici )

Le travail d’un élève (très soigneux !)

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Neue Nationalgalerie

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

"Eiffel Tower" by Robert Delaunay (1928)

Robert Delaunay created the large-scale painting Eiffel Tower, the last in a series, in Paris in 1928. Colourfully depicting the Eiffel Tower in Paris from a bird’s eye view, it was inspired by photographs taken from aeroplanes. The Eiffel Tower virtually becomes a rocket, seeming to take off from the earth. An advanced state of ageing, numerous revisions, soiling and old restorations, as well as a now cloudy finish, prompted the conservation and restoration of the painting for its prominent inclusion in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s inaugural reopening exhibition .

Robert Delaunay at work on Eiffel Tower, 1928 © Germaine Krull

Hana Streicher during restoration of Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Ina Hausmann

The work environment for the restoration of Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Hana Streicher

The painting exhibited an overall diffuse and noticeably uneven visual effect because of surface soiling and the partially milky (i.e. blanched) and irregularly applied finish coat that covered the colourful work like a grey smear. There were numerous areas with loosened layers of paint across the work’s entire surface.

The restoration objective was to secure all areas of the paint layer threatened by separation and to give the painting a cohesive and visually aesthetic overall impression.

The measures were accompanied by extensive art-technological examinations such as macro and microscopic inspections under visible light as well as UV excitation, sampling and analyses.

Intermediate stage of surface cleaning © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Hana Streicher

Overall view under UV excitation © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Hana Streicher

Detail, showing clear streaks in the finish © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Hana Streicher

The deterioration of the finish or varnish known as blanching appears opaque white and can, in some cases, be regenerated with the help of solvents. Such interventions must be carefully considered to achieve the desired effect and avoid any damage to the original substance. In Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower , the original appearance was severely distorted by soiling and blanching. Thanks to the measures carried out by the restorer, the painting has regained its readability.

Detail with blanching before (left) and after (right) the regeneration © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Hana Streicher und Ina Hausmann

Project management:  Hana Streicher, Restoration department of the Neue Nationalgalerie Planning / Coordination: Hana Streicher Implementation: Hana Streicher und Ina Hausmann Duration:  2020

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La tour Eiffel

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SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Eiffel Tower

Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower (Tour Eiffel), 1911 (dated 1910 by the artist). Oil on canvas, 79 1/2 × 54 1/2 inches (202 × 138.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.463

Introduction

As it was for many literary and artistic figures of the day, the Eiffel Tower, built for the Exposition Universelle de Paris of 1889, became a symbol of modernity for Robert Delaunay (b. 1885, Paris; d. 1941, Montpellier, France). Delaunay envisioned breaking down boundaries and transforming Europe into a global community, and the Eiffel Tower, in its capacity as a radio tower, embodied international communications. He first painted the tower in celebration of his engagement to fellow artist Sonia Terk in 1909 and would make it the subject of at least thirty works over the next few years and again in the 1920s.

Delaunay’s early treatments of the Eiffel Tower use a limited palette and simple blocklike forms. Centrally located within each of the compositions, the Eiffel Tower assumes the iconic drama of a portrait. The more dynamic representation of Eiffel Tower with Trees signals a shift in the artist’s style. Delaunay showed the tower from several viewpoints, capturing and synthesizing several impressions at once. It is significant that this painting was executed when he was away from Paris, working from memory.

Eiffel Tower with Trees marks the beginning of Delaunay’s self-described “destructive” phase: the solid form in his earlier works becomes fragmented and begins to crumble. Delaunay chose a subject that allowed him to indulge his preference for a sense of vast space, atmosphere, and light, while evoking a sign of modernity and progress. Delaunay’s achievements in style represent a new century and its shift toward urbanization.

Many of Delaunay’s images are views from a window framed by curtains. In Eiffel Tower the buildings bracketing the tower curve like drapery. The vantage point of the window allows the Eiffel Tower series to combine exterior and interior spheres, and recalls a traditional, Romantic notion of the open window.

Before showing the class Robert Delaunay’s painting, project a photograph of the Eiffel Tower. You may even be able to locate vintage photographs online. Robert Delaunay is known to have owned more than one postcard with a photo of the Eiffel Tower that he may have used as a reference for some of his paintings.

Ask students what they notice as well as what they know about the Eiffel Tower. You may want to provide some background information so that the students understand that the Eiffel Tower was not only an impressive architectural structure, but also a symbol of Parisian modernity. Show: Eiffel Tower, 1911

How is Delaunay’s painting similar or different from the photograph of the Eiffel Tower? What adjectives would you use to describe this work?

Over his lifetime Delaunay concentrated (some say obsessively) on particular places, painting them again and again. If you were to choose a place to explore again and again, where would you choose? Why?

ITP 104: Tour Eiffel by Robert Delaunay

Andrew's archives.

Between 1909 and 1914 Delaunay painted the imposing structure of the Eiffel Tower more than thirty times. Although the Douanier Rousseau and Georges Seurat had both included it as a background detail in earlier paintings of the Parisian scene, Delaunay was the first artist to make it the focal point of a picture. He guarded his precedence, in this respect, with great jealousy. Ever wary of imitators, he even took to backdating his work, as if to emphasise just how early he had staked out the   territory. This explains why, although the picture reproduced here was actually painted in 1911, it is dated – in the bottom lefthand corner – the year before. Almost twice as tall as any other man-made construction of its time, the Eiffel Tower was viewed by Delaunay as an epitome of the modern age –   a monument which seemed to condense all that made the early twentieth century such an invigorating and exciting time to be alive. Its eponymous designer, Gustav Eiffel, whose ingenuity was matched only by his instinct for publicity, had himself done much to promote the idea that his creation and...

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Robert Delaunay 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. Robert was born on April 12, 1885, in Paris. In 1902, after secondary education, he apprenticed in a studio for theater sets in Belleville. In 1903 he started painting and by 1904 was exhibiting. That year and in 1906 his work was shown at the Salon d’Automne and from 1904 until World War I at the Salon des Indépendants.

Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay became friendly with Henri Rousseau and Jean Metzinger and studied the color theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul. During these years, he painted in a Neo-Impressionist manner; Paul Cézanne’s work also influenced Delaunay around this time. From 1907 to 1908 he served in the military in Laon, and upon returning to Paris he had contact with the Cubists. The period of 1909–10 saw the emergence of Delaunay’s personal style; he painted his first Eiffel Tower in 1909. In 1910 Delaunay married the painter Sonia Terk, who became his collaborator on many projects.

More Artworks by Robert Delaunay (View all 74 Artworks)

Femme nue lisant (Nude Woman Reading) (1920)

Une fenêtre (1912)

Les Coureurs (1930)

Nature morte aux gants (1907)

Nude woman reading (1915)

L’Équipe de Cardiff (1922-1923)

Eiffel Tower (1924)

La Ville De Paris, Esquisse (1911)

The Cardiff team (1913)

Étude pour ‘Air, fer et eau’ (1936-37)

Carousel of Pigs (1906)

La tour aux rideaux (1910)

The Three Windows, the Tower and the Wheel (1912)

La Ville de Paris (1912)

Portrait De Maria Lani (1928-29)

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