Carousel of Pigs
Robert Delaunay (1885 to 1941) · 1922
Not currently on display. The Centre Pompidou building is closed for renovation from September 2025 until about 2030, so this work is not on view in Paris; check the museum website for where the collection is being shown. No dedicated Wikipedia article found for this painting, so wikipedia_url is left empty.
A fairground carousel spins at night under electric light. Painted pigs with riders whirl past, a woman in a hat and a man with a moustache flash by at the front, and everything dissolves into rings and discs of colour, red against green, orange against blue, as though the whole scene were a wheel of light. Delaunay loved the popular fairs of Paris, and the electric carousel, with its blaring music and its new dazzling lamps, was for him the perfect modern subject: motion, noise, crowds and colour all at once.
The painting is built on Delaunay's theory of simultaneous contrast, the idea, taken from the chemist Chevreul, that colours placed side by side change each other and can create movement on their own. Look at the concentric circles that structure the picture, the same circular forms he had used before the war in his abstract Discs, and at the way the figures are painted as bright fragments that seem to catch the eye for an instant and then vanish. Delaunay called the picture an electric prism and compared its effect to a violent piece of music.
This is the third and largest version of the subject. He had painted the carousel first in 1906 and then in 1913, and this version was shown at the gallery of Paul Guillaume in 1922 and at the Salon des Indépendants the following year. It came to the museum in 1956 as a gift from Sonia Delaunay, his wife and fellow painter, who devoted the years after his death to placing his work in public collections. Together the Delaunays gave Paris its most joyful abstraction, and this canvas is its fairground.
Did You Know? The carousel pigs were a real feature of Paris fairs, and Delaunay was so fond of the subject that he returned to it three times over sixteen years.
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