Interpretations of Cubism in Painting & Design

A major group of works by Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, along with Franz Marc's Stables (1913), interpret Cubism with an emphasis on color. Several works by Robert Delaunay from his Windows series focus on the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of the modern spirit of the time. Through overlapping and juxtaposed planes of color, Delaunay created illusionistic depth, suggesting the form of this modern structure in these prismatic compositions. The paintings also demonstrate the relationship between French art and the avant-garde Blaue Reiter group in Germany. Marc, who visited Delaunay's studio in France, invited him as well as Braque and Picasso to present their works in the 1912 Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich.

Frantisek Kupka is credited as being one of the first twentieth-century artists to make abstract paintings. After Kupka's death in 1957, the Guggenheim and the Musé national d'art moderne were the only two institutions to accord him retrospectives, until an international traveling retrospective finally took place in 1997. This group of works by Kupka shows his development from figuration to abstraction. The union of experimental studies and finished works from the two collections reveals his process of simplifying organic forms into vibrating, geometric compositions.

In 1992, the MNAM merged with the Centre de cré industrielle to explore the relationship between art and design in the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, avant-garde aesthetics intervened in the creation of both artworks and everyday objects, so that artists and designers shared an emphasis on geometric form. Thus, rationalism and geometric abstraction can be seen in work from the CCI by such designers as Marcel Breuer and Wilhem Wagenfeld of the German Bauhaus, Gerrit Rietveld of the Dutch De Stijl movement, and Pierre Chareau, Eileen Gray, René Herbst, and Jacques Le Chevallier of the French Union des Artistes Modernes.