Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay is a French painter emblematic of the avant-garde generation of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris on April 12, 1885, he came from a bourgeois family. As a child, he was introduced to traditional painting by his uncle, the painter Charles Damour. Not very interested in studies, Robert Delaunay left school at the age of 17. Explaining that he wanted to become a "painter of modernity", he turned to stage decoration for the theater, and then produced his first works. If he is passionate about colors, he is also interested in pictorial techniques created by electrical energy and its multiple applications. Rejected by the prestigious Salon d'Automne in 1906, Robert Delaunay was nevertheless noticed at the Salon des Indépendants, thanks to an abundant production on the monuments of Paris. In 1909, he met Sonia Stern, who became his wife. Together they founded the Orphic movement, a branch of Cubism. From then on, Robert Delaunay became famous thanks to his reflections on the energy diffused by the continuous movement of colors, and created new pictorial languages such as simultaneism, which consists in playing with the simultaneous contrast of colors.