Simultaneous Windows

Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part), to use its full name, is a Robert Delaunay painting from 1912 which resides today at the Guggenheim Museum in the US.

Introduction

Artist Delaunay took in many artistic influences in the early years of the 20th century, and would attempt to fuse these into his own unique method. He would also marry Sonia Terk, who was an established artist herself, and they met just a few years before Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) was completed.

Description

The painting features fractures of colour, as if a scene from real life has been converted into a series of squares, just as one might experience with a pixelated digital image. This is all as intended and reminds us of Robert Delaunay's connection to the Cubist movement, and artists such as Jean Metzinger and Paul Cezanne.

Delaunay differed somewhat from the mainstream Cubist movement in that he tended to choose bright, positive palettes, in whichever style he was working. Within Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) we find tones of green as the dominant colour, with additional touches of orange, blue, yellow and purple. Some may be reminded of the work of Franz Marc, and Delaunay also spent time mixing with German artists during a spell away from his native France.

[This part of his career was] a period of transition from Cézanne to Cubism.

Robert Delaunay

Colour was key to this painting, as well as the series as a whole. He chose complementing colours and wanted to give an abstract interpretation of someone looking out from their window. We see perhaps a mountain landscape in the distance, forms that can be recognised just before the artist transitions into a fuller level of abstraction.

Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon provides another example from this series, where warm tones contrast against blues and greens. The feeling is contemporary, even today, and marks an exciting period in the artist's career where he continues to experiment and is far from the end of his artistic evolution at this point.

Painting Details

Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (Les fenêtres simultanées [2e motif, 1re partie]) can be found at the Guggenheim Museum in the US. It measures 21 3/4 x 18 3/8 inches (55.2 x 46.7 cm) and was completed in 1912, at which point the artist would have been around 27 years of age. It is believed to have been gifted to the institution by the Guggenheim family.

Conclusion

Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) represents Robert Delaunay's career well from the 1910s, in terms of his transition towards abstraction, as well as his consistent palettes of colour. He still had more discoveries and experiments to perform, but was starting to find a method in which his many influences could effectively be fused together.