Oil and wax on canvas
In his Windows series, a group of twenty-two paintings made between April and December of 1912, Delaunay rejected painting’s traditional function as a window onto an imaginary world. Instead he turned to the pictorial surface as a place where the process of seeing itself could be recorded. “Without visual perception there is no light, no movement,” Delaunay wrote in the summer of 1912. “This movement is provided by relationships of uneven measures, by color contrasts, which constitute Reality.” Light and its structuring of vision, the simultaneous contrasts of colors and their steady rhythmic motion, became the subjects of Delaunay’s Windows, setting the stage for his move into abstraction. “The Windows,” he wrote, “truly began my life as an artist.”
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
Private collection. Before 1948
Galerie d'Art du Faubourg, Paris. Until July 22, 1948
Sidney and Harriet Janis, New York. July 22, 1948–1967. Acquired from above
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, 1967
Provenance research is a work in progress, and is frequently updated with new information. If you have any questions or information to provide about the listed works, please email [email protected] or write to:
Provenance Research Project
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
Explore more
A Cubist Salon
Gallery 503What does Cubism look like? For the international network of artists who first engaged with this movement, it was a work in progress.
Learn more →
Installation views
We have identified this work in the following photos from our exhibition history.
Licensing
Artwork or archival images
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
Audio and film clips
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.
Text from a publication or the archives
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
Feedback
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.