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This medal has been minted in France in 1980 to commemorate the French abstract artist, Robert DELAUNAY, 1885 - 1941.
It is signed
by the prominent French medalist, Daniel OCTOBRE.
Rare!!!
Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors, influenced by Fauvism, the theoretical writings of Paul Signac, Charles Henry and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul. This movement, perceived as key in the transition from Cubism to Abstract art, was pioneered by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, who relaunched the use of color during the monochromatic phase of Cubism. The meaning of the term Orphism was elusive when it first appeared and remains to some extent vague.
av.
The portrait of Robert Delaunay; Daniel Octobre
rv. The inscription in French and the abstract motives related to his works
diameter – 68 mm,
(2¾“)
weight – 143.30 gr, (5.05 oz)
metal – bronze, mint patina
Robert Delaunay was born in Paris, the son
of George Delaunay and Countess Berthe
Félicie de Rose. While he was a child, Delaunay's parents divorced, and he was
raised by his mother's sister Marie and her husband Charles Damour, in La
Ronchère near Bourges. When he
failed his final exam and said he wanted to become a painter, his uncle in 1902
sent him to Ronsin's atelier to study Decorative Arts in the Belleville district of Paris.
At age 19, he left Ronsin to focus entirely on painting and contributed six
works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904.
He traveled to Brittany, where he
was influenced by the group of
Pont-Aven; and, in 1906, he contributed works he painted in
Brittany to the 22nd Salon des Indépendants, where he met Henri Rousseau.
Delaunay formed a close friendship at this time with Jean Metzinger, with whom he
shared an exhibition at a gallery run by Berthe Weill early in 1907.
The two of them were singled out by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1907 as Divisionists who used large,
mosaic-like 'cubes' to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.
Robert Delaunay, Paysage au disque,
1906–07, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Musée national d'art moderne (MNAM), Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris
Robert Herbert writes: "Metzinger's Neo-Impressionist period was
somewhat longer than that of his close friend Delaunay... The height of his
Neo-Impressionist work was in 1906 and 1907, when he and Delaunay did portraits
of each other (Art market, London, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) in
prominent rectangles of pigment. (In the sky of Coucher de soleil no. 1, 1906–07,
Collection Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, is the solar disk which Delaunay was
later to make into a personal emblem)." Herbert describes the vibrating
image of the sun in Metzinger's painting, and so too of Delaunay's Paysage
au disque (1906–07), as "an homage to the decomposition of spectral
light that lay at the heart of Neo-Impressionist color theory..."
Metzinger, followed closely by Delaunay—the two often painting together in 1906 and 1907—would develop a new sub-style of Neo-Impressionism that had great significance shortly thereafter within the context of their Cubist works. Piet Mondrian developed a similar mosaic-like Divisionist technique circa 1909. The Futurists later (1909–1916) would incorporate the style, under the influence of Gino Severini's Parisian works (from 1907 onward), into their dynamic paintings and sculpture.
At the prime of his career he painted the known series
that included: the Saint-Sévrin series (1909–10); the City series (1909–11);
the Eiffel Tower series (1909–12); the City of Paris
series (1911–12); the Window series (1912–14); the Cardiff Team
series (1913); the Circular Forms series (1913); and The First Disk (1913).
Delaunay is most closely identified with Orphism. From 1912 to 1914, he painted
nonfigurative paintings based on the optical characteristics of brilliant
colors that were so dynamic they would function as the form. His theories are
mostly concerned with color and light and influenced many including Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, Der Blaue Reiter, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger. Apollinaire was strongly
influenced by Delaunay’s theories of color and often quoted from them to
explain Orphism. Delaunay’s fixations with color as the expressive and
structural means were sustained with his study of color.
His writings on color, which were influenced by
scientists and theoreticians, are intuitive and can be sometimes random
statements based on the belief that color is a thing in itself with its own
powers of expression and form. He believes painting is a purely visual art that
depends on intellectual elements, and perception is in the impact of colored
light from the eye. The contrasts and harmonies of color produce in the eye
simultaneous movements and correspond to movement in nature. Vision becomes the
subject of painting.
His early paintings are deeply rooted in Neoimpressionism. Night Scene for
example has vigorous activity with the use of lively brushstrokes in bright
colors against a dark background. It doesn’t define solid object but the areas
that surround them.
Spectral colors of Neoimpressionism were later abandoned,
the Eiffel Tower series, were fragmentation of solid objects and their merging
with space was learned. Influences in this series were Cézanne, Analytical
Cubism, and Futurism. In the Eiffel Tower the interpenetration of tangible
objects and surrounding space is accompanies by intense movement of geometric
plans that are more dynamic than static equilibrium of Cubist forms.
In 1908, after a term in the military working as a
regimental librarian, he met Sonia Terk; at the
time she was married to a German art dealer whom she would soon divorce. In
1909, Delaunay began to paint a series of studies of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. The following
year, he married Terk, and the couple settled in a studio apartment in Paris,
where their son Charles was born
in January 1911. At the invitation of Wassily
Kandinsky, Delaunay joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), a Munich-based
group of abstract artists,
in 1911, and his art took a turn for the abstract Delaunay was also successful
in Germany, Switzerland, and Russia. He participated in the first Blanc Reiter
exhibition in Munich and sold four works. Delaunay’s paintings encouraged an
enthusiastic response with Blaue Reiter. The Blaue Reiter connections led to
Erwin Ritter von Busse’s article “Robert Delaunay’s Methods of Compositions”
which appeared in the 1912 Blaue Reiter Almanac. Delaunay would go to exhibit
in February of that year, in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich and
Valet de Carrean in Moscow.
“This happened in
1912. Cubism was in full force. I made paintings that seemed like prisms
compared to the Cubism my fellow artists were producing. I was the heretic of
Cubism. I had great arguments with my comrades who banned color from their
palette, depriving it of all elemental mobility. I was accused of returning to
Impressionism, of making decorative paintings, etc.… I felt I had almost
reached my goal”.
1912 was a turning point for Delaunay. On March 13 his
first major exhibition in Paris closed after two weeks at the Galerie Barbazanges. The exhibition
showed forty-six works from his early Impressionist works to his Cubist Eiffel
Tower painting from 1909–1911. Art Critic Guillaume Apollinaire praised those
works of the exhibition and proclaimed Delaunay as “an artist who has a monumental
vision of the world.”
In the March 23, 1912, issue of L'Assiette au Beurre, The
first published suggestion that Delaunay had broken with this group of Cubists
appeared, in James Burkley's review of that year's Salon des Indépendants.
Burkley wrote, "The Cubists, who occupy only a room, have multiplied.
Their leaders, Picasso and Braque, have not participated in their grouping, and
Delaunay, commonly labeled a Cubist, has wished to isolate himself and declare
that he has nothing in common with Metzinger or Le Fauconnier.”
With Apollinaire, Delaunay
traveled to Berlin in January
1913 for an exhibition of his work at Galerie Der Sturm. On their
way back to Paris, the two stayed with August
Macke in Bonn, where
Macke introduced them to Max Ernst. When his
painting La ville de Paris was rejected by the Armory Show as being
too big he instructed Samuel
Halpert to remove all his works from the show.
At the outbreak of the First World
War in 1914 Sonia and Robert were staying in Fontarabie in Spain.
They decided not to return to France and settled in Madrid. In August 1915 they
moved to Portugal where they shared a home with Samuel
Halpert and Eduardo
Viana. With Viana and their friends Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (whom the
Delaunays had already met in Paris) and José de Almada Negreiros they discussed an
artistic partnership. First declared a deserter, Robert
was declared unfit for military duty at the French consulate in Vigo on June
13, 1916.
The Russian Revolution brought an end to
the financial support Sonia received from her family in Russia, and a different
source of income was needed. In 1917 the Delaunays met Sergei Diaghilev in Madrid.
Robert designed the stage for his production of Cleopatra (costume design
by Sonia
Delaunay). Robert Delaunay illustrates Tour Eiffel for Vicente Huidobro.
Paul Poiret refused a
business partnership with Sonia in 1920, citing as one of the reasons her
marriage to a deserter. The Der Sturm gallery in
Berlin showed works by Sonia and Robert from their Portuguese
period the same year.
After the war, in 1921, they returned to Paris. Delaunay
continued to work in a mostly abstract style. During the 1937 World
Fair in Paris, Delaunay participated in the design of the railway and
air travel pavilions. When World War II erupted,
the Delaunays moved to the Auvergne, in an effort to avoid the invading German forces.
Suffering from cancer, Delaunay
was unable to endure being moved around, and his health deteriorated. He died
from cancer on 25 October 1941 in Montpellier at the age
of 56. His body was reburied in 1952 in Gambais.