What follows is a wonderful historical record of how a particular artist resolved the issues of a particular subject, to yield a masterpiece of art. It was written by Blaise Cendrars in 1924, about his friend, the painter Robert Delaunay, and the creation of his painting, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911)*

The Eiffel Tower

-dedicated to Madame Sonia Dulauney

“…In the years 1910, 1911, Robert Delaunay and I were perhaps the only ones in Paris talking about machines and art and with a vague awareness of the great transformation of the modern world.

Paris World Fair Exhibition, 1900

At that time, I was working in Chartres, with B…, on the perfecting of his plane with various angles of incidence, and Robert, who had worked for a time as a journeyman mechanic,  in some artisan locksmith shop, was prowling, in a blue coat, around the Eiffel Tower.

One day, as I was coming back from Chartres, I fell out of the car at the exit of the Parc du Saint-Cloud and broke my leg. I was carried to the nearest hotel, the Hôtel de Palais, kept by Alexandre Dumas and his sons. I stayed there, in that hotel bed for twenty-eight days, lying on my back with a weight pulling on my leg. I had the bed pushed against the window. Thus, every morning, when the boy brought me my breakfast, threw open the shutters and opened the window wide, I had the impression that he was bringing me Paris on his tray. I could see, through the window, the Eiffel Tower like a clear flask of water, the domes of the Invalides and the Panthéon like a teapot and a sugar bowl, and Sacré-Cœur, white and pink, like a candy. Delaunay came almost every day to keep me company. He was always haunted by the Tower and the view from my window attracted him strongly. He would often sketch of bring his box of colors.

It was thus I was able to be present at an unforgettable drama: the struggle of an artist with a subject so new that he didn’t know how to capture it, to subdue it. I have never seen a man struggle and defend himself so, except perhaps the mortally wounded men abandoned on the field of battle who, after two or three days of superhuman efforts, would finally quiet down and return to the night. But he, Delaunay remained victor.

And now, think of my hotel window opening onto Paris. It was the subject of all his preoccupations, a ready-made painting which had to be interpreted, constructed, painted, created, expressed. And it was quite difficult. In that year, 1911 Delaunay painted, I believe, fifty one canvases o f the Eiffel Tower before succeeding.

As soon as I could go out, I went with Delaunay to see the Tower. Here is our trip around and in the Tower.

No art formula known until then could make the pretense of resolving plastically the problem of the Eiffel Tower. Realism made it smaller; the old laws of Italian perspective made it look thinner. The Tower rose above Paris, as slender as a hat pin. When we walked away from it, it dominated Paris, stiff and perpendicular; when we approached it, it bowed and leaned out over us. Seen from the first platform, it wound like a cork screw, and seen from the top, it collapsed under its own weight, its legs spread out, its neck sunk in. Delaunay always wanted to depict Paris around it, to situate it. We tried all points of view, we looked at it from all angles, from all sides, and its sharpest profile is the one you can see from the Passy footbridge.

Robert Delaunay, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911-pre-1923). Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection.

And those thousands of tons of iron, those 35 million bolts, those 300 meters high of interlaced girders and beams, those four arches with a spread of 100 meters, all that jelly-like mass flirted with us. On certain spring days it was supple and laughing and opened its parasol of clouds under our very nose. On certain stormy days it sulked, sour and ungracious; it seemed cold. At midnight we ceased to exist, all its fires were for New York with whom it was already flirting then; and at noon it gave the time to ships on the high seas.  It taught me the Morse Code which allows me today to understand radio messages. And as we were prowling around it, we discovered that it exerted a singular attraction for a host of people. Lovers climbed a hundred, two hundred meters over Paris to be alone; couples on their honeymoon came from the provinces and from abroad to visit it; one day we met a boy of fifteen who had traveled from Dusseldorf to Paris, on foot, just to see it. The first planes turned about it and said hello, Santos-Dumont had already taken it for his destination at the time of his memorable dirigible flight, as the germans were taking it for their target during the war, a symbolic and not a strategic target, and I can assure you that he wouldn’t have hit it because the Parisians would have killed themselves for it, and Gallieni had decided to blow it up, our own Tower!

So many points of view to treat the problem of the Eiffel Tower. But Delaunay wanted to interpret it plastically. He finally succeeded with the famous canvas that everybody knows. He took the Tower apart to make it fit into his frame, he truncated it, and bent it to give it 300 meters of dixxying height, he adopted 10 points of view, 15 perspectives, so that one part is seen from below, another from above, the houses surrounding it are taken from the right, from the left, bird’s-eye view, level with the ground…” (1924)

*Excerpt from, Transforming Visions- Writers on Art, an Art Institute of Chicago publication, Bullfinch Press, Little Brown & Co., 1994