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At the beginning of the 20th century, the French-born artist Robert DELAUNAY (1885-1941) and his wife Sonia DELAUNAY-TERK were among the pioneers of abstraction along with KANDINSKY, MONDRIAN and MALEVITCH. Abstraction draws its origins from the scientific understanding of visual and sound perceptions but also from esotericism and spirituality. It will lead these artists to abandon the representation of reality for a liberation of color and line. For Robert DELAUNAY and the members of this artistic trend, it is a personal, thoughtful, philosophical and emotional approach, enriched by travel, the ambient political context but also by the Fauve, Expressionist and Cubist movements which they assimilate while adding their experience. In the history of art, abstraction is not just a movement, it appears as a break between 1910 and 1920. Robert DELAUNAY is the main creator of two movements: Orphism and simultanism.
Delaunay was part of an avant-garde generation, particularly prolific on the artistic level between 1912 and 1914. He was very close (in correspondence, in art, even in friendship) with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, the painters Russians Vassily Kandinsky and Michel Larionov, German painters August Macke or Franz Marc, Slovak painter Geza Szobel.
After the war, he became friends with the artists of the surrealist movement, of whom he produced several portraits, without however adopting their points of view and their artistic visions. In particular, he will have a strong and lasting friendship with the poet Tristan Tzara.