Robert Delaunay

The French painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) revolutionised the use of colour in art. Influenced by the French master Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), close friends with the French poet Apollinaire (1880–1918) and admired by the German painter Paul Klee (1879–1940), he founded the Orphism art movement together with his wife Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) in the early 1910s. Geometric shapes and bright colours marked his way to a unique form of Abstractionism that earned him a place among the greatest artistic minds of the first half of the 20th century.