Eiffel Tower

Robert Delaunay made this at least 60 paintings of the Eiffel Tower throughout his career. The structure became his enduring obsession, what he called "the barometer of my art." He first painted the tower between 1909 and 1912, then returned to the subject with new approaches in the 1920s.

His early tower paintings fracture the structure into faceted, Cubist forms that seem to dissolve into the surrounding city. But Delaunay pushed beyond Cubism's brown and black palette toward vibrant color, co-founding a movement called Orphism with his wife Sonia. As she wrote, "The Tower was his liberated muse, his Eve of the future."

The Eiffel Tower represented everything modern: erected in 1889, it was then the world's tallest building, looming over classical Paris. For Delaunay and other modernists, it symbolized the dawn of the machine age. Later versions looked down from hot air balloons, breaking the tower into symphonic patchworks of color and light.