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Robert Delaunay — La Tour simultanée
Robert Delaunay

La Tour simultanée

1910

La Tour simultanée places the Eiffel Tower at the center of a compositional experiment that would define Delaunay's mature vision. Rendered in gouache, pen and India ink, brown ink, and colored pencils over pencil on parchment, the work captures the monument not as a stable landmark but as a structure in perpetual visual flux, its iron latticework dissolving and reasserting itself against a fragmented sky. Completed in 1910, the sheet belongs to the pivotal series through which Delaunay dismantled conventional perspective, treating the tower as both subject and formal pretext for an investigation into how light and movement could fracture and reconstitute form on a flat surface. The medium itself rewards close attention. Parchment lends the support a warm, luminous ground that activates the layered materials above it, with the translucency of the gouache playing against the precision of inked lines and the softer passages of colored pencil. This material complexity reflects the experimental urgency of the moment, a period when Delaunay was absorbing Cézanne's structural logic and pressing it toward something more kinetic and chromatic. The composition does not merely depict simultaneity as a concept; it performs it, asking the eye to reconcile competing vantage points within a single, unified field. For collectors, the significance of this work rests on several converging factors. It is signed, a relatively early dated example from the tower series that would bring Delaunay international recognition, and a rare instance of the artist working at this scale in mixed media on parchment. Works of this period and pedigree seldom appear on the primary market, and the sheet's intimate dimensions intensify rather than diminish its ambition. Presented at Christie's, La Tour simultanée offers a direct point of entry into one of the most consequential bodies of work in early European modernism.

Medium
Gouache, pen and India ink and brown ink, colored pencils over pencil on parchment
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
Christie's, Beverly Hills, CA

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About this work

Robert Delaunay, La Tour simultanée, 1910

La Tour simultanée places the Eiffel Tower at the center of a compositional experiment that would define Delaunay's mature vision. Rendered in gouache, pen and India ink, brown ink, and colored pencils over pencil on parchment, the work captures the monument not as a stable landmark but as a structure in perpetual visual flux, its iron latticework dissolving and reasserting itself against a fragmented sky. Completed in 1910, the sheet belongs to the pivotal series through which Delaunay dismantled conventional perspective, treating the tower as both subject and formal pretext for an investigation into how light and movement could fracture and reconstitute form on a flat surface. The medium itself rewards close attention. Parchment lends the support a warm, luminous ground that activates the layered materials above it, with the translucency of the gouache playing against the precision of inked lines and the softer passages of colored pencil. This material complexity reflects the experimental urgency of the moment, a period when Delaunay was absorbing Cézanne's structural logic and pressing it toward something more kinetic and chromatic. The composition does not merely depict simultaneity as a concept; it performs it, asking the eye to reconcile competing vantage points within a single, unified field. For collectors, the significance of this work rests on several converging factors. It is signed, a relatively early dated example from the tower series that would bring Delaunay international recognition, and a rare instance of the artist working at this scale in mixed media on parchment. Works of this period and pedigree seldom appear on the primary market, and the sheet's intimate dimensions intensify rather than diminish its ambition. Presented at Christie's, La Tour simultanée offers a direct point of entry into one of the most consequential bodies of work in early European modernism.

Medium
Gouache, pen and India ink and brown ink, colored pencils over pencil on parchment
Dimensions
overall: 63.2 x 47.9 cm
Year
1910
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Christie's, London, United Kingdom

More works by Robert Delaunay

Collected by

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Cleveland Museum of Art