Galerie Barbazanges in Paris opened a Robert Delaunay exhibition, with work by Marie Laurencin also included, on February 28, 1912. The gallery listing identifies the run as February 28 to March 13 and describes it as Delaunay's first major exhibition, spanning forty-six works from early Impressionist pictures through Paris cityscapes and Cubist treatments of the Eiffel Tower. The show is important because it placed Delaunay's rapidly changing language before a Paris gallery public just as Cubism was splintering into more color-centered experiments. It also connected the commercial gallery world around Henri Barbazanges and Paul Poiret with the avant-garde networks that helped make prewar Paris a laboratory for modernism.
The exhibition helped establish Delaunay's public profile before the emergence of Orphism.
