Robert Delaunay

French painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) pioneered Orphism, a movement that pushed Cubism toward pure abstraction through brilliant color. Born in Paris to an aristocratic family, he was raised by an aunt and uncle in the countryside near Bourges after his parents divorced. He abandoned formal education at 19 to focus entirely on painting, contributing six works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904. Early influences included Neo-Impressionism and Cézanne, but by 1909 he was painting the Eiffel Tower in fractured, Cubist-inspired compositions. Unlike the muted browns and grays of Picasso and Braque, Delaunay used vivid colorful contrasts that made forms seem to vibrate and pulse with light. In 1910 he married fellow artist Sonia Terk, and together they developed a theory of color they called Simultanism.

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "Orphism" in 1912 to describe Delaunay's colorful abstraction, linking it symbolically to Orpheus, the mythological figure whose music moved all of nature. His Simultaneous Windows series (1912) and Premier Disque (1913) were among the earliest completely non-representational paintings in Western art, abandoning recognizable imagery for pure arrangements of color. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky invited him to exhibit with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, spreading his influence to German Expressionism. His theories on color affected artists from Franz Marc and Paul Klee to Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s, he and Sonia created large murals for the 1937 Paris Exposition. Today, major works hang at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d'Orsay, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.