“Delaunay silently invented an art of pure color. We are evolving toward an entirely new art that will be to painting... what music is to poetry. It will be an art of pure painting.”
Executed in 1936, Nature morte stands at the apotheosis of Robert Delaunay's visionary conception of abstraction through the primacy of light and color. Pursuing a mode of “pure painting,” Delaunay’s supplanting of objective form with orchestrations of chromatic relationships, which he viewed as the ultimate means of conveying reality, would form the cornerstone of the Orphist movement that developed in Paris on the eve of the First World War. The artist's 1912 letter to August Macke formed a treatise of this pioneering artistic idiom: “Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable… where I attach great importance is in the observation of the movement of colors. It’s only in this way that I find the laws of the simultaneous and complementary contrasts of colors that nourish the rhythm of my vision. There, I find the representative essence…” (republished in Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Robert Delaunay: De l'impressionnisme à l'abstraction 1906-1914, 1999, p. 55). Evolved from his dedicated study of optical and chromatic theories developed by the likes of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Wood, which had likewise informed the revolutionary Divisionism of the Neo-Impressionists at the eve of the twentieth century, bodies of work such as his Formes circulaires and Disques employed the use of simultaneous contrast to catalyze a sense rhythmic and vibratory movement through the juxtaposition of opposing colors within curvilinear forms (see fig. 1).
Fig. 2 Robert Delaunay, Contrastes simultanés: soleil et lune, 1913, The Museum Of Modern Art, New York
1930 marked a resumption of this pioneering modality of abstraction following the figurative preoccupations that had dominated Delaunay's oeuvre since the outbreak of World War I. Nature morte spoke to the development of Delaunay’s corpus of Rhythmes, which marked an apogee of technical sophistication and dynamism within his oeuvre. Emanating from an anchoring diagonal throughline, the present work is animated by an architecture of concentric, interlaced circles of kaleidoscopic hues that together form an engrossing flux of energy and ceaseless radial movement that surpasses the delineations of the canvas. Nature morte thus evinces Delaunay’s achievement of a new height in his enduring aim to create works capable of transcending both pictorial and spiritual bounds. As the artist declared, “The concept of a boundless universe leads to the painting that has been inserted into a frame being rejected and replaced with one which continues both inside and outside, and even extends into eternity” (Robert Delaunay quoted in Exh. Cat., Zurich, Galerie Art Focus, Robert Delaunay —Sonia Delaunay, 2001, p. 18).
"[Delaunay’s 1930s works] are free color rhythms, harmonious dimensions… they did justice to the demands Delaunay made of his work: they are both pure art and part of life.”
Nature morte is distinguished in its engagement with the figurative mode that Delaunay had all but renounced by this decade. Both the distilled geometries of dishware and the undulating, lozenge-patterned crimson tablecloth from which the interlacing discs spring forth are extrapolated from the imagery of his sojourn in Portugal from 1914 to 1918, which marked among the richest phases of creative production for the artist. Just as the matchless intensity of sun and hue in these climes aligned with his artistic outlook during that earlier period, his re-engagement with this subject matter in the present work offers a dialogue with an abstracted reconstruction of form through the interrelation of light and color.
The present work equally evinces Delaunay’s keen interest in the incorporation of innovative materials within his works of the 1930s. Building upon his experimentation with the inclusion of media such as wax at the height of the Orphist movement, the artist during this period devised novel admixtures of oil with cement, sand or plaster applied to canvas or board. Such relief works not only achieved a heightened sculptural dimensionality, but further opened the artist to the architectural potential of his practice and the integration of his works with their external environments. Marie Merio writes, “These studies witness one of the major preoccupations of the artist since the mid-1920s: to integrate non-objective art into everyday life. through its collaboration with architecture. With his Reliefs, he poses the problem of an abandonment of easel painting in an enlargement of technique, in a fusion of painting, sculpture and architecture. Delaunay's aim was to ‘revolutionize the walls’, to create large-scale wall works, architectures, expressing a grand collective idea” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Robert Delaunay: Rhythms sans fin, 2014, p. 36). The tactile volumes of Nature morte, rendered in a cement enriched by a vibrant coloration largely unseen in Delaunay’s relief works, allow for the modulation of light across its surface. Heightened by the contrasts between dark and light values across the composition, such materiality achieves a striking interplay of depth and volumetric allusion.
Fig. 6 Interior of the Hall tronconique of the Exposition Internationale de Paris, 1937
Fig. 7 Robert Delaunay, Panneau du Palais de l'air, 1937
Nature morte thus heralds the conceptual advancements that would come to be fully realized in the following year with his crowning opus, a commission for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, described by Matthew Drutt as, “the most monumental expression of their ideas in [his career]” (Exh. Cat., Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (and traveling), Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series, 1997-98, pp. 42-3). Achieved in concert with designer Félix Aublet, Delaunay developed a grand architectural program spanning the two pavilions dedicated to modern transport, the Palais de l’Air and Palais de Chemins de Fer, thus wholly realizing the potential of painting to transcend beyond its plastic limits. “The invention of a new translucid and colored material, Rhodoid, permitted him, in combination with luminous projections, to erase the materiality of buildings. The interior of the Palais de l’air, notably, appeared to dissolve in a polychromatic, purely atmospheric spectacle, as if Delaunay sought to realize the profusion of sensations inherent to modern life…through their radicality and degree of innovation,the work for the Pavillions appears today as the apex of Delaunay’s career” (Angela Lampe in Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Robert Delaunay: Rhythms sans fin, 2014, p. 46). The composition painted on the reverse of the present work possibly serves as a preparatory work for this project.
Fig. 9 Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2025 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Delaunay's pioneering interrogation of the full expressive possibilities of abstracted color would find affinity in the art of generations to follow, from the monumental chromatic precision of Frank Stella's Protractor works to the engrossing synthesis of architecture and geometry in the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt (see figs. 8-9). Held in the Joseph H. Hazen Collection for over seventy years and not publicly exhibited since 1967, Nature morte comes to auction for the first time.
