Champs de Mars, the Red Tower
The Eiffel Tower broken into red facets among the rooftops of the Champ de Mars — Delaunay's emblem of the modern city.
Eiffel Tower
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Champs de Mars, the Red Tower — at a glance
- Artist
- Robert Delaunay (1885–1941)
- Year
- 1911 (reworked 1923)
- Movement
- Cubism / Orphism
- Place
- The Eiffel Tower, Champ de Mars, Paris 7e
- Viewpoint
- The real tower and its quarter, fractured into faceted planes — the tower, park and buildings all survive
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- c. 161 × 129 cm
- Now at
- Art Institute of Chicago
Overview
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower is one of about thirty paintings and studies in which Robert Delaunay took the Eiffel Tower as his subject between about 1909 and 1912 (this canvas begun in 1911 and reworked in 1923). The iron tower, painted a vivid orange-red, is tilted, split and multiplied into faceted planes; around and behind it, the pale block-like buildings of the surrounding quarter and swirling white clouds. It is oil on canvas, about 161 by 129 cm, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Where was Champs de Mars, the Red Tower painted?
Scholarship The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair, stands at one end of the Champ de Mars, the long open park on the Left Bank of the Seine in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. Delaunay lived nearby and painted the tower obsessively as the sign of the new century. The tower, the Champ de Mars and the Haussmann apartment blocks around them are all still there and instantly recognisable, so the subject is entirely real; Delaunay's fracturing of it is a style, not a change of place.
What is in the painting?
The red tower rears up the centre of the canvas, its four legs, arches and lattice broken into shifting, overlapping fragments as if seen from several viewpoints at once and shaken. Around its base and behind, tall pale buildings are reduced to leaning cubes; billowing white and grey clouds wrap the upper structure. Strong red against greys, whites and blues.
Look closely
The faceted red tower
The tower's legs, arches and lattice are split and overlapped as if seen from many viewpoints at once and shaken.
The cubic buildings
The pale apartment blocks around the base are reduced to leaning cubes.
The churning cloud
Billowing white and grey clouds wrap the upper structure and join its geometry.
Analysis
Composition and technique
The tower dismantled into faceted planes and reassembled, surrounded by cubic buildings and churning cloud.
Scholarship Delaunay uses a Cubist-derived fracturing but keeps strong colour and a clear central motif: the tower is taken apart and put back together with a sense of movement and vertigo, and the clouds and buildings are drawn into the same restless geometry. It is a celebration of the tower as the emblem of the modern, dynamic city.
Meaning and interpretation
Interpretations differ. What the artist documented, what museums and scholars propose, and later or speculative theories are marked and kept separate.
The modern icon
For Delaunay the Eiffel Tower stood for the twentieth century — technology, height, simultaneity, the shared sign of Paris. Breaking it into moving facets was a way of painting not the object but the experience of it: seen from many angles, in motion, part of the sky and the city at once.
History & provenance
The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago (Joseph Winterbotham Collection).
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago — collection entry for Robert Delaunay, ‘Champs de Mars: The Red Tower’ (1911, reworked 1923)
- Matthew Drutt / Guggenheim literature on Delaunay's Eiffel Tower series
Related paintings
Myself: Portrait – Landscape
1890
Rousseau's 1890 self-portrait with the then-new Eiffel Tower on the skyline.
The Street Enters the House
1911
Boccioni's Futurist Milan of 1911 — the same year, the same breaking-up of the modern city.
Vue de toits
1878
Caillebotte's Paris roofscape — the stable modern city that Delaunay sets in motion.