Windows on the City

Delaunay began his window pictures in April 1912, and German artists greeted them with more enthusiasm than they met in France. The first of them to see the new series and write about it was Paul Klee, at a show of the Moderner Bund, a Swiss artists' group, in Zurich in July 1912. Klee then translated Delaunay's essay on light into German, and it came out in the Berlin magazine Der Sturm in January 1913. In these pictures the view from a window over Paris breaks into prisms of colour, and in every one of the series the green or bluish silhouette of the Eiffel Tower can still just be made out. This small one is undated. A list Delaunay drew up places it as late as 1914, and he worked it in wax crayon heightened with white, so the transparency gives way to a certain density. The propeller-like shapes in its upper half belong to the circular forms he was painting at the same time.