About the Art

Artistic genius Robert Delaunay (1885 – 1941) founded Orphism—a fusion of Fauve color, Futurist Dynamism and Analytical Cubism that replicated nature’s light and rhythms rather than its appearance. Originally a theater set designer, Delaunay began exhibiting just one year after he started painting. His early works were created in a neo-Impressionist style, and later utilized Cubist principles to explore contrasting colors. He created a series of disk paintings in which large and small colored circles suggest movement and space, as well as artworks containing faceted planes of color, mathematical in precision. Delaunay also experimented with unconventional mediums, and profoundly influenced abstract art’s emergence in the 1920s.