Nobody was betting on Louis Blériot! On the outsider, the unlucky entrepreneur. The Frenchman was also said to be of little use as a pilot. That changed on Sunday, July 25, 1909: 36 kilometers and 37 minutes made Louis Blériot famous. He was the first person to fly across the English Channel from Calais to Dover. He built the plane himself. He immediately received more than 100 orders. Louis Blériot thus became a pioneer of commercial aircraft construction. Five years later, Robert Delaunay created a picturesque monument to the aviation pioneer. The picture shown here is pure rotation. It shows airplanes, rotor blades and propellers, surrounded by disc-shaped colored segments and circles. You can almost hear the engines and feel the vibration. In total, two large versions and six preliminary studies of the work are known. The work is part of Delaunay's series of paintings "Disques", which means "discs" in German. The series is based on the color theory of Michel Eugène Chevreuls, which relies on simultaneous and complementary contrasts. Five preliminary studies of the work have been known so far: Interestingly, the study on paper here in the Murnau collection once belonged to the American painter Morgan Russell. The larger counterpart is clearly the painting with the same motif in the Kunstmuseum Basel. With this picture and other works, Robert Delaunay influenced German Expressionism. One of his works, for example, was shown in 1911 in the first exhibition "The Editors of the Blue Rider" in the Modern Gallery Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich. It shows an interior view of the Gothic Severinskirche in Paris. This picture did not stay with Thannhauser for long. Adolf Erbslöh, himself a painter and first chairman of the New Artists' Association in Munich, also had an exhibition in the gallery at the same time. There he sees the painting of the artist competition. Erbslöh buys Delaunay's painting - the first sale for Delaunay ever. A year later, in 1912, Robert Delaunay is represented with five works in the almanac "Der Blaue Reiter".