Thoughts of Paris in the springtime prompted this week’s choice of picture: Robert Delaunay’s exhilarating depiction of the Eiffel Tower, painted a little over 90 years ago. Anyone wanting to experience the vicarious thrill of being dwarfed by Paris’s most famous landmark has just five days left to see this spectacular work – Delaunay’s tour de force, so to speak – while it is still in this country. Currently on loan to the Royal Academy as part of an entertaining ragbag of an exhibition, “Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968”, it returns home to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York at the end of the week.
Between 1909 and 1914 Delaunay painted the imposing structure of the Eiffel Tower more than thirty times. Although the Douanier Rousseau and Georges Seurat had both included it as a background detail in earlier paintings of the Parisian scene, Delaunay was the first artist to make it the focal point of a picture. He guarded his precedence, in this respect, with great jealousy. Ever wary of imitators, he even took to backdating his work, as if to emphasise just how early he had staked out the territory. This explains why, although the picture reproduced here was actually painted in 1911, it is dated – in the bottom lefthand corner – the year before.
Almost twice as tall as any other man-made construction of its time, the Eiffel Tower was viewed by Delaunay as an epitome of the modern age – a monument which seemed to condense all that made the early twentieth century such an invigorating and exciting time to be alive. Its eponymous designer, Gustav Eiffel, whose ingenuity was matched only by his instinct for publicity, had himself done much to promote the idea that his creation and...
