Political Drama

Now available on a range of gifts and homeware is this 1914 oil and collage artwork by French artist, Robert Delauney. 

Robert Delaunay had little artistic training beyond an apprenticeship to a stage-set designer. He studied the colour theories of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul and how the neo-impressionists applied them to painting. He is best known for his Eiffel Tower series of 1909–1913, his Windows of 1912–1914, and his Circular Forms of 1913, which paved the way for Political Drama. His wife, Sonia Delaunay, was a painter and fabric designer whose work informed his use of collage and abstraction from the start.

In 1912, the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire praised Delaunay for his painting The Three Graces, in which curving lines and patches of colour create a luminous, harmonious pattern. Apollinaire invented the term “Orphic cubism,” a reference to the mythical Greek musician and poet Orpheus, to emphasize the lyricism and musicality of this and other works. Delaunay at first embraced the term but later coined “simultaneism,” which placed more emphasis on colour theory, the impact of succession, repetition, and contrast on colour perception, and on Henri Bergson’s ideas about the intuitive perception of time and space.

What Delaunay had to say of his tondo First Disk of 1913, a remarkably early example of a fully abstract work without figure or ground, is also relevant to Political Drama: “Colours opposing each other had no reference to anything visible. In fact, the colours, though contrasts, were placed circularly....Reds and blues were opposed in the centre...determining the extraordinarily fast vibrations physically perceptible to the naked eye. One day I called this experiment a ‘first punch.’” Delaunay carried this idea of visual violence into Political Drama and animated it with a story of actual violence: a newspaper illustration depicting a murder. The caption to the illustration reads: “Tragic epilogue....The Wife of the French Finance Minister Joseph Cailloux Shoots Dead Gaston Calmette the Editor of Le Figaro.” 

Credit: Gift of the Joseph H. Hazen Foundation, Inc.