Robert Delaunay painted numerous views of Paris. The view of the city through a window is the subject of a series of pictures that he painted in 1912. The Eiffel Tower, Paris’ landmark, is standing in the centre. The curved lines we can distinguish to the left and right suggest the presence of curtains.

Delaunay refrained from reproducing the city in detail and made the surface of the window itself the subject. He subdivided it in a chequered style of rectangles and squares that are crossed by diagonals and circular arcs. It is from this view of the world that the artist chooses his own abstract order. This type of composition consisting of regularly arranged geometric fields is a primary feature of the modern.

In Delaunay’s Fenêtres sur la ville the pictorial fields are occupied by colour. We can see spectral graduations from yellow-orange through to violet-blue to blue-green, but also complementary contrasts. Such contrasts come into being when two colours from opposite positions within the colour wheel run into each other, for example blue and orange or yellow and violet. It is the order of the colours and their interplay that define the picture, not the order of reality.

Paul Klee was among the first artists to be impressed with these new pictures. He understood that Delaunay hadn’t merely designed decorations. He called the window pictures, "a creation of 3-dimensional life," "almost as far removed from a carpet as a Bach Fugue."