Robert and Sonia Delaunay shortly

Robert Delaunay's bright and formal experiments paintings were a unique mix of European art styles from the early 1900s. The world of Belle Époque Paris, where he and his wife, Sonia Delaunay (Terk), started the Orphism movement, was the setting for many of his most famous works. There were many types of works in this style, and the colors and subjects used were very modern and showed happiness with modern life and technology.

Neo-Impressionism and the painting style called pointillism or divisionism influenced Delaunay. In his early works, he used squares of color to make shapes that looked like mosaics. He often left blank spots on canvas to make the impression of room and light. His love of bright colors was clear even at this early stage of his career.

As Delaunay's style grew, he turned his squares that looked like mosaics into more complicated geometric shapes with broken solid objects and empty spaces around them, a lot like Cubism. These paintings are well-known for the lively way they move and how they celebrate city life, especially Paris with the Eiffel Tower as a symbol that Delaunay used a lot.

He wrote his theories about color, in which he talks about color as both a physical form and a powerful way to present ideas. He was most interested in how the mixing of colors created the sense of movement and depth without using natural elements. Delaunay wrote that:

breaking up of form by light creates colored planes... [that] are the structure of the picture... nature is no longer a subject for description but a pretext.

He eventually gave up “images or reality that come to corrupt the order of color” and started painting without any real subjects at all.