Date: 14-04-2002
Owning Institution: Guggenheim Museum
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 20th Century          

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 the zeitgeist itself were, somehow, inextricably linked. Eiffel had arranged for the names of 72 French scientists of the previous hundred years to be painted in gilded letters around the first platform (Delaunay alludes to this frieze with a little passage of hieroglyphic suggestion at the appropriate place in his kaleidoscope of a painting). He had also turned the tower into a kind of theatre of experiment. Spotlights on the balcony of the third platform were used to illuminate different Parisian monuments within a range of seven miles. Thermomemters, barometers and anemometers were installed at the top of the tower to record weather conditions at 1000 feet of altitude. There was a laboratory for the study of aerodynamics on its second platform, and a wind tunnel at its base.

Delaunay, for his part, perceived a poetic as well as a scientific link between the Eiffel Tower and the new science of aviation. He saw it as a building which itself aspired to the condition of an aeroplane, soaring into the sky and introducing mankind to a multitude of dizzying new perspectives on the world. As if all that were not enough, he even fell in love with his future wife – Sonia Terk, later Delaunay – while walking in its shadow. The painter became, he said, “almost mystically bewitched” by the tower, transported by its beauty “to a condition very close to ecsatsy”.

His problem, which can perhaps be sensed in the hectic and fractured composition of his painting, was that of finding a way to squeeze all that the Eiffel Tower embodied, for him, within the compass of s single image. The writer Blaise Cendrars, who was very close to the artist during the most feverish years of his attachment to the subject, described Delaunay’s struggles:

“He was always haunted by the tower and the sight of it from my window much attracted him… No art formula known then could claim to solve plastically the case of the Eiffel Tower. Realism reduced it: the old laws of Italian perspective thinned it out. The tower rose in the Parisian sky like a hatpin. When we walked away from it, it dominated the city, stiff and perpendicular; when we approached it, it bent and leaned above us. Seen from the first platform, it corkscrewed, and seen from the top, it crumpled with its legs spread out and its neck drawn in. Delaunay also wanted to depict Paris all around it and to situate it. We tried every point of view, we looked at it from every angle, from every side … Finally, Delaunay disjointed the tower in order to bring it into his own scope; he truncated it; he inclined it in order to give it its 1001 feet of vertigo; he adopted ten points of view, fifteen perspectives, some seen from above, others from below…”

Among the many different perspectives combined in the picture shown here, Delaunay gave precedence to that of the Eiffel Tower seen from the Passerelle de Passy. This was (and is) a hilltop site on the other side of the Seine from the Champs de Mars which, Cendrars believed, offered “the most perfect sight” of the tower, seen slightly from above and framed by imposing seven-storey apartment buildings. Delaunay’s picture is anchored in a distorted version of that particular view, but everything else about it is characterised by violence and flux, typified by the clouds exploding like shellbursts in a fractured, crystalline sky. The tower itself has been powerfully twisted out of shape by Delaunay’s decision to present it as a composite of different perspectives. Seen from above and below and straight-on all at the same time, the rust-red  iron colossus represents not a single object itself but a multitude of different memories and imagined views of it. The world of the city, over which it presides, has been made to seem as fragile as a cracked windowpane.

The notion that a painting might seek to defy the traditional stasis of visual art and combine a mobile succession of views was derived from Cubism, which Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso had been developing in Paris during the years of Delaunay’s obsession with the tower. Delaunay took the idea to unsettling extremes, producing in the process what amounted to a new kind of mythological painting. The visual brokenness of his Eiffel Tower also lends it articulation, giving the impression that the metal construction has metamorphosed into a creature, capable of stirring its legs and bestriding the city like a giant. In this sense, Delaunay did indeed succeed in painting not just the object of his fascination but also what he felt it represented: an awe-inspiring but scarily ineluctable form of progress. The great red god rises, leaving nothing untouched and nothing undisturbed.