Robert Delaunay — Rythmes sans fin — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 15, 2014 → January 12, 2015

The exhibition Robert Delaunay : Rythmes sans fin reveals the extraordinary wealth of the Centre Pompidou’s holdings of the work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Thanks in particular to the substantial gift to the nation made by Sonia and her son Charles in 1964, these are unequalled in the world.

Through some eighty works, including paintings, drawings, reliefs, mosaics, models and photographs, the exhibition explores the relatively unknown second period in the work of this exponent of “pure painting”, that of the years after the Great War.

It was then that Delaunay escaped the constraint of canvas and stretcher, beginning in the 1930s to engage with architectural space in the production of mural works. Under the influence of such urban novelties as the gigantism of the Eiffel Tower, the impact of the advertising hoarding, and the electrification of street lighting, Robert Delaunay had seen modernity as a visual excess, a submersive optical sensation — a monumental, dazzling blaze. The act of seeing itself thus became the subject of his painting as he investigated simultaneity. Acting directly on the viewer’s sensibility as it did, for Delaunay this painting had a “popular aspect”, in pursuit of which he extended his work into the wider environment of interior decoration, cinema and architecture.