1909

Saint-Séverin

French, 1885 - 1941

Between the spring of 1909 and early 1910, Robert Delaunay made a series of seven paintings of the Gothic church of Saint-Séverin. Located near his studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris—a district traditionally known for its community of young, unconventional artists and intellectuals—the church included a fifteenth-century south ambulatory, or processional area, which Delaunay chose to focus on in these works. Though the space as depicted has a definite feeling of perspective, or the illusion of recession into a fictive third dimension, Delaunay emphasized specific elements of the architecture that aligned with his own dynamic interpretation of the Cubist aesthetic of fragmented surfaces and distorted forms. These elements include off-kilter columns, complex ribbed vaults branching upward from them, and the pointed stained-glass window and its refracted colored light, which seems to dematerialize the floor on which it lands into semitransparent planes.