The Eiffel Tower series of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) is a cycle of paintings and drawings of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was built by Gustave Eiffel.
The series was painted in an emerging Orphist style, an art movement co-founded by Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka that added bright colors and increased abstraction to Cubism. The Eiffel Tower series sits chronologically and stylistically between the artist's Saint-Séverin series and Windows series.
| Year | Image | Title | Collection | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1909–12, original series | ||||
| 1909 | La Tour à l'univers s'adresse | Philadelphia Museum of Art | ||
| 1909–10 | La Tour Eiffel | Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe | ||
| 1910 | La tour aux rideaux | Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen | ||
| 1910 | Tour Eiffel aux arbres | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | ||
| 1911 | Tour Eiffel | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | ||
| 1911 | Art Institute of Chicago[1] | |||
| 1911–12 | La Tour Rouge | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | ||
| 1911–12 | Les trois Grâces (étude pour "La Ville de Paris") | Private collection | ||
| 1912 | La Ville de Paris | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris | ||
| 1920s, return to theme | ||||
| 1922 | La Tour Eiffel et jardin du champs de mars | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | ||
| 1922 | La Tour Eiffel | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | ||
| 1924 | La Tour Eiffel | Dallas Museum of Art | ||
| 1926 | La Tour Eiffel | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris | ||
| 1926 | La Tour Eiffel | Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris | ||
| 1926–28 | La Tour Eiffel | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | ||
Delaunay's Eiffel Tower series is evoked in architectural paintings of other iconic buildings by his contemporary, the New York artist John Marin, in his Woolworth Building, No. 31 of 1912,[2] and later by the Ontario artist Greg Curnoe's CN Tower series of the 1970s and 1980s.[3]
The 1913 artist's book La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, a collaborative work between Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise Cendrars, forms an epic narrative of a Trans-Siberian Railway journey that concludes in Paris at a Simultanist Eiffel Tower. They had announced a plan to sell 150 copies of the book, which would equal in height the Tower itself.[4]
The Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's appreciation of Delaunay's work informed his Soviet montage theory, as he imagined developing cinematically "a dynamic fusion of a series, moving past the spectator, of those hundred views of the Eiffel Tower" rather than a "summation within a single canvas".[5]
Cendrars's 1924 essay on Robert Delaunay describes his feminization of the Tower, and Sonia Delaunay described the Eiffel Tower as her husband's "Eve future" [6]
A 1911 painting from the series is featured in the 1980 BBC series 100 Great Paintings.