Robert Delaunay, Rhythms, 1934
© Center Pompidou, MNAM-CCI
Photo: Jacqueline Hyde

Through around eighty works - paintings, drawings, reliefs, mosaics, models, photographs - this exhibition explores the second period of the master of "pure painting", that which begins at the end of the years of war and which is still unknown.

Delaunay then freed himself from the frame of the canvas to create, from the 1930s, murals and take up architectural space. Under the effect of urban innovations ranging from the gigantic size of the Eiffel Tower to the impact of billboards and the electrification of the streets, Robert Delaunay perceives modernity as a visual overflow, an optical sensation that overwhelms: monumental, dazzling and dazzling . The act of seeing is therefore established as the subject of his painting marked by research on simultaneity. Acting directly on the spectator's sensitivity, his painting thus takes on a "popular aspect" for the artist, which successively leads him to widen the scope of his work to the contemporary environment (interior decoration, cinema, architecture).

The colored discs, invented before the war, became circular modules, which, repeated endlessly, became synonymous with the rhythm of modern life. In 1935, Robert Delaunay exhibited wall coverings in relief and in colors of a total technical novelty, made with an extraordinary variety of materials, the surfaces then come alive with a play of textures. The artist aims for nothing less than a revolution in the arts, no longer in the pictorial field, but in the field of architecture. The combination of color and light allow Robert Delaunay to put his work into rhythm.

"I make the revolution in the walls"

The second part of the exhibition is devoted to the astonishing decorative arrangements that Robert Delaunay - with the young architect Félix Aublet - made for the Palais des Chemins de Fer and Palais de l'Air which caused a sensation at the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris. .

Thanks to a set of original documentary photographs from the collections of the Kandinsky Library and presented in the form of a slideshow, as well as models, preparatory studies and a choice of plans of buildings borrowed from the National Archives, this spectacular project will come to life again in the exhibition rooms.

Endless Rhythms updates the reading of Robert Delaunay's work and inscribes it in the history of modern art, beyond Orphism and Optical Abstraction to which it is too often reduced.

The catalog of the exhibition is published by the Editions du Center Pompidou, it contains several anthologies of texts, including one on current events in wall art in the 1930s and another on the rare and often unpublished writings of Robert Delaunay between 1924 and 1930.

The exhibition will take place from October 15, 2014 to January 12, 2015 at the Center Pompidou in the gallery of the museum level 4.