Robert Delaunay valuation
Painted the Eiffel Tower breaking apart, then discs of pure colour; Apollinaire called the result Orphism.
Robert Delaunay was born in Paris in 1885 and brought up largely by an aunt and uncle near Bourges.
What a work by Robert Delaunay is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Robert Delaunay was born in Paris in 1885 and brought up largely by an aunt and uncle near Bourges. From 1902 he trained as a decorator in the Ronsin workshop in Belleville, left at nineteen to paint, and sent six works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904. Brittany and the Pont-Aven painters shaped his early work. In 1908 he met the painter Sonia Terk, whom he married in 1910. From 1909 he painted the Eiffel Tower series, and the Windows and Circular Forms that followed led Guillaume Apollinaire to name Orphism. Kandinsky invited him to join the Blaue Reiter in 1911. The war of 1914 found the couple in Spain, and they stayed in Madrid and Portugal until 1921. He worked on the railway and air pavilions for the 1937 Paris exhibition, and died at Montpellier in 1941.
The work falls into clear series: Saint-Séverin, the City, the Eiffel Towers, the Windows, the Circular Forms and the late Rhythms. Placing a work in its series and date is where a valuation starts, and works on paper appear more often than oils. Sonia Delaunay and their son Charles gave a large group of his work and hers to the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 1964. Guy Habasque's catalogue of 1957 is the standard reference.
Barbazanges, Der Sturm and the Blaue Reiter
He showed in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich in 1911 and sold four works there. His first large Paris exhibition, at the Galerie Barbazanges in 1912, was organised by the mathematician Maurice Princet and showed forty-six works.
In January 1913 he went to Berlin with Apollinaire for his exhibition at Der Sturm. When the Armory Show turned down The City of Paris as too big, he withdrew all his work from it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
