The Eiffel Tower series of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) is a cycle of paintings and drawings of the Eiffel Tower.
The series was painted in an emerging Orphist style, an art movement co-founded by Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka that added bright colors and increased abstraction to Cubism. The Eiffel Tower series sits chronologically and stylistically between the artist's Saint-Séverin series and Windows series.
Eiffel Tower as symbol
Course of style over series
List of works YearImageTitleCollection1909–12, original series1909La Tour à l'univers s'adressePhiladelphia Museum of Art1909–10La Tour EiffelStaatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe1910La tour aux rideauxKunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen1910Tour Eiffel aux arbresSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum1911Tour EiffelSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum1911Champs de Mars: The Red Tower Art Institute of Chicago1911–12La Tour RougeSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum1911–12Les trois Grâces (étude pour "La Ville de Paris")Private collection1912La Ville de ParisMusée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris1920s, return to theme1922La Tour Eiffel et jardin du champs de marsHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden1922La Tour EiffelHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden1924La Tour EiffelDallas Museum of Art1926La Tour EiffelMusée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris1926La Tour EiffelMusée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris1926–28La Tour EiffelSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Legacy Delaunay's Eiffel Tower series is evoked in architectural paintings of other iconic buildings by his contemporary, the New York artist John Marin, in his Woolworth Building, No. 31 of 1912, and later by the Ontario artist Greg Curnoe's CN Tower series of the 1970s and 1980s.
The 1913 artist's book La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, a collaborative work between Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise Cendrars, forms an epic narrative of a Trans-Siberian Railway journey that concludes in Paris at a Simultanist Eiffel Tower. They had announced a plan to sell 150 copies of the book, which would equal in height the Tower itself.
The Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's appreciation of Delaunay's work informed his Soviet montage theory, as he imagined developing cinematically "a dynamic fusion of a series, moving past the spectator, of those hundred views of the Eiffel Tower" rather than a "summation within a single canvas".
Cendrars's 1924 essay on Robert Delaunay describes his feminization of the Tower, and Sonia Delaunay described the Eiffel Tower as her husband's "Eve future"
A 1911 painting from the series is featured in the 1980 BBC series 100 Great Paintings.
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