Portuguese Woman (The Large Portuguese)

Let's move to sunny Portugal!

Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement who cofounded the Orphism art movement (noted for its use of strong colors and geometric shapes) with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others.  When you look at today's painting, you immediately understand what we mean here!

When the First World War broke out, Robert and Sonia Delaunay were vacationing in the Spanish resort town of San Sebastián. After spending some time in Madrid, they moved to the Portuguese village of Vila do Conde, near Oporto, where they lived from June 1915 to March 1916. The couple was captivated by the warm, clear light of northern Portugal, inspiring a series of paintings depicting country markets. While Robert Delaunay had begun exploring abstract art around 1912, he did not view abstraction as an end in itself, unlike contemporaries such as Kandinsky and Kupka. In his work, figurative and abstract elements seamlessly combine to amplify the dynamic interplay of color. During this period, Delaunay experimented with mixing oil and wax to achieve maximum color saturation, a technique he abandoned after leaving Portugal.

I can't believe it's February already! If you still don't have a beautiful calendar to hang on your wall, don't wait a minute longer and order one of the last copies of our Monthly Wall Calendar  (now 40% off)!  :) 

P.S. Robert Delaunay was exploring new, avant-garde ways to create art but he was also drawn to modern themes. Take a look at Delaunay's painting of Eiffel Tower! In this masterpiece, the icon of Paris looked like nothing anyone had seen before.