Robert Delaunay 'Eiffel Tower' Exhibition Poster

Robert Delaunay painted and drew the Eiffel Tower repeatedly between around 1909 and 1928, and it became the great recurring subject of his early career. This poster carries one of those compositions: the tower fractured and tilted, surrounding buildings buckling around it as if glimpsed all at once from several windows.

When Delaunay began the series, the tower was barely twenty years old and still divided Parisian opinion — a forest of iron many residents considered an eyesore. He made it a symbol of the new century instead. With his wife Sonia Delaunay he developed a style the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named Orphism: it kept Cubism’s fractured structure but flooded it with colour and built the image on the way contrasting hues vibrate against one another. The tower was the ideal subject for it, modern and vertical, carrying the same industrial confidence the Delaunays wanted their painting to express.

Where the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque was deliberately near-monochrome, Delaunay pushed the opposite way, towards saturated, near-abstract colour. The result reads as Cubist structure painted with a Fauvist palette, and it turned a piece of engineering France had nearly rejected into one of the defining images of modern Paris.

Our poster imagines a 1950s Paris exhibition, using the typographic conventions of a mid-century French gallery announcement. The layout keeps the design clean so that Delaunay’s colour and the diagonal energy of the tower carry the page.

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