Painting complementary colors opposite one another, revolutionary French artist Robert Delaunay exuberantly conveyed life’s delights and complexities in “Rhythm, Joie de Vivre.” Delaunay (1885 – 1941) was originally a theater set painter who later employed Cubist theories to explore contrasting colors. Delaunay’s talent emerged rapidly, and he began exhibiting only a year after he started painting. His unique style sparked Orphism, which expressed an object’s movement, light and rhythm, rather than its physical form. Delaunay’s art also incorporated wax, sand, mosaics and lacquered stone, and powerfully influenced the development of abstract art in the 1920s.

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