Robert DELAUNAY
French 1885-1941
Nude woman reading
1915
oil on canvas
86.2 x 72.4 cm
Felton Bequest 1966
1665-5

Delaunay painted Nude woman reading in Madrid in 1915, a year after he and his wife, the painter Sonia Delaunay, had left Paris for Spain and Portugal. They remained there for the next seven years. The move marked a dramatic change in Delaunay's art, both in colour and in subject matter.

In Paris, during the two preceding years, Delaunay had experimented with the effects of colour vibration and proposed a theory that linked colour, light, music and poetry. The strong light of Spain intensified his reaction to colour. More dramatically, he abandoned abstract subjects for strongly figurative work.

Though Nude woman reading is clearly representational, it is still essentially concerned with the colour theory and the vibrations achieved through dissonant colours. This can be seen in the alignment of pink, orange and red, of violet-blue and yellow-orange, but most particularly in the prismatic colours that describe the torso. This is the only period Delaunay chose to paint the female nude, though he made at least nine further variations on the theme.