The first English-language study of the influential French painter Robert Delaunay to appear in thirty years. Delaunay has long been appreciated as one of the leading Parisian artists of the early twentieth century. And art historians have consistently viewed his vibrantly colored paintings starting in 1912 as early experiments in abstraction. Hughes, however, tautly argues that Delaunay was not just one of the earliest artists to work in pure abstraction, but the earliest one to do so. The colorful, optically driven canvases that Delaunay produced set him apart from the more ethereal abstraction of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Kupka, with whom he is often clubbed and whose spiritual motivations he rejected. Delaunay s paintings were grounded in material sensation and reflected the modern optical science of his time. They had nothing in common with the idealism that drove Kandinsky and the others. As a result, his work set the stage not only for the kind of abstraction that would come to dominate painting in the mid twentieth century (Pollock, Stella, Still, Kline); it also inspired the critics who theorized and elevated that particular strain of modernist practice."

The French painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) revolutionised the use of colour in art. Influenced by the French master Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), close friends with the French poet Apollinaire (1880-1918) and admired by the German painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), he founded the Orphism art movement together with his wife Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) in the early 1910s. Geometric shapes and bright colours marked his way to a unique form of Abstractionism that earned him a place among the greatest artistic minds of the first half of the 20th century.

Robert Delaunay and The City of Lights will recognise Delaunay's unwavering commitment to colour in painting to convey form, depth, light and movement, while highlighting how the modern metropolis of Paris often provided the inspiration for his imagery and pictorial research. The newly commissioned texts allow the reader to experience the wide-ranging and prescient nature of Robert Delaunay's work - exploring the significant themes of movement, technology, sport, and advertising that were to preoccupy him throughout his career.

"The Delaunays' efforts to ensure that their work would be perceived as they had conceived it prompted several essays and lectures, numerous letters, and volumes of notebooks, most of which have never been translated into English. The light they shed on the life and thought of this exciting period in the history of art will be invaluable to any student of modern art"--

Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter Robert Delaunay, and co-founder of the Orphist school in 1910, was the center of a brilliant circle in Paris. Madsen offers a rich and compelling look at this fascinating and influential woman, the first living female artist to have a retrospective show at the Louvre.

Published to accompany an exhibition which moved from the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in February 1998, this is a study of a series of paintings and drawings of Paris between 1909 and 1914 which established Robert Delaunay as a major artist.

Writings on color from modernism to the present, with contributions writers from Baudelaire to Baudrillard, surveying art from Paul Gauguin to Rachel Whiteread.