Rhythms

By 1934 Robert Delaunay had come full circle, literally. Before the First World War he and his wife Sonia had helped invent a kind of abstraction built from pure colour and spinning discs, which a poet friend nicknamed Orphism. Through the 1920s Delaunay drifted back toward figures and portraits. Then, around 1930, he dropped all of that for good and returned to the circle. Rhythms belongs to a series he began in 1934, more radical than his early work, with no object or figure left at all, just interlocking rings of colour set turning against one another. He meant these to live on a large scale, to animate the walls of modern buildings rather than hang as easel pictures. He was working toward exactly that at the end of the decade, for the Paris exhibition of 1937.