Circular Forms, Moon No. 1

In 1913 Robert Delaunay painted, in quick succession, a run of pictures he called circular forms, some named suns and some moons. In his window pictures of the year before he had built a painting out of the laws of colour. Now, as the Lenbachhaus puts it, the subject was light itself, the source of everything we see. The moons are quieter than the suns. Here a pale, matt white and reddish core sits in a stretched oval, and bands of colour settle around it, narrow near the centre and swelling outwards, then gather at the bottom into a loose loop that sets the whole thing slowly turning. That autumn it hung in Berlin, with many others from the series, at the First German Autumn Salon, the big international show mounted by the gallery owner Herwarth Walden. German painters took a lot from these pictures. August Macke's Colour Circles of 1913 came out of them, and Franz Marc used them in his first attempts at wholly abstract painting. Delaunay signed this one at the lower right with the years 1912 and 1913.