By Emily Burkhart
August 28, 2023
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914. Oil on canvas, 250 x 250 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Artsy.
Color is the skin of the world
-Sonia Delaunay
A multidisciplinary artist with a diverse career Sonia Delauay (1885-1979) was a painter, but also a textile, fashion and costume designer. She illustrated books, made quilts, curtains, lampshades, and clothing. She revolutionized haute couture by merging art with fashion in the 1910s and 1920s. She explored color and form in her work, devoting herself to Orphism, an art movement founded by her husband, Robert Delaunay (1885-1941). Tall with cropped hair, Delauney herself epitomized the 1920s New Woman with her avant-garde clothing designs and collaborations with textile companies, poets, playwrights, film directors and celebrities. The colorful geometric patterns and abstract shapes in her paintings were echoed in the wearable art she created and carried over into car and textile design.
Childhood and Education (1885-1904)
Anonymous portrait photograph of Sonia Delaunay (cropped), ca. 1912. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Élievna Stern on November 14, 1885, in the village of Gradizhsk near Odessa, Russian Empire (now Odesa, Ukraine), to impoverished Jewish parents, Elias and Hannah Stern. Little is known about Delaunay’s early childhood but she was the youngest of three children, and sent in 1890 at the age of five to live with her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, a wealthy lawyer in St. Petersburg, and his wife Anna. Although her mother never allowed a legal adoption, Sonia thought of the Terks as her family and took the name Sofia Terk, using “Sonia” as a nickname. She never returned to her parents.
Delaunay enjoyed a privileged upbringing in St. Petersburg. The Terks introduced her to music, literature, and art. The family traveled throughout Europe visiting museums and galleries and spent summers in Finland. She learned several foreign languages and developed an interest in drawing. At sixteen, while attending a prestigious secondary school in St. Petersburg, an art teacher noticed Delaunay's talent and encouraged her aunt and uncle to send her to Germany for further training. In 1903, at the age of eighteen, she moved to Germany to study at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts under Ludwig Schmidt-Reutler (1863–1909). Delaunay remained in Germany until 1905, then moved to Paris. She maintained contact with Germany, however, exhibiting at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in 1913, 1920 and 1921.
Paris and Early Works (1905-1910)
In Paris, Delaunay studied at the Académie de La Palette in Montparnasse, a private art school, where she attended classes and learned printmaking from Rudolf Grossman (1889–1941). Active between 1888 and 1914, the Académie de La Palette promoted“conciliation entre la liberté et le respect de la tradition” (reconciliation between freedom and respect for tradition) in painting. Unhappy with this mode of teaching, Delaunay spent more time in museums and attending art exhibitions around Paris where she believed she got a better education than at the Académie. Her early paintings were influenced by the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist art she saw, including that of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and of Henri Rousseau, who became a close friend. She also borrowed the expressive use of color from the Fauve painters Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and André Derain (1880-1954). Some of her notable works during this period are Philomene (1907), Sleeping Girl (1907), and Yellow Nude (1908).
Philomene (1907)
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Philomene, 1907. Oil on canvas, 41.3 x 33.4 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Image courtesy of Art Blart.
One of Delaunay’s earliest Fauve-inspired paintings, Philomene (1907), portrays an unknown woman against a floral background. Delaunay has placed “Philomene” against yellow wallpaper with red and blue flowers. The girl wears a modest, high-necked red blouse, her black skirt matching the color of her hair. She has wide green eyes lined with orange. Her cheekbones and nose are dabbed with orange also. She has arched, black eyebrows and a small mouth with thin pink lips. Seated in three-quarter view, Philomene stares into the distance, her arms crossed on her lap. The bold use of color and the combination of yellow, green, orange, red, blue and pink paint all composing her complexion and hands are reminiscent of Matisse.The bold outlines remind one of the Post-Impressionist cloissonné technique of Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) Symbolist works such as The Yellow Christ (1889).
Sleeping Girl (1907)
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Sleeping Girl, 1907. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Art Blart.
Another work from 1907, Sleeping Girl, depicts a young woman asleep on a yellow-green couch. Delaunay emphasizes the girl’s relaxed facial features in repose. Compared to Philomene, Sleeping Girl utilizes a softer palette in a closely cropped composition focusing on the girl’s relaxed face, her head resting on her right arm. The yellow pendant necklace dangling from her neck matches the yellow-green of the couch. The girl’s brown hair is tinged with yellow as well as with the navy blue of her sweater. Delaunay’s expressionistic use of pink and blue paint to highlight and shade the girl’s cheekbones, nose, lips, ear, and hand seem inspired by Derain.
Yellow Nude (1908)
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Yellow Nude, 1908. Oil on canvas, 98 x 65 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes. Image courtesy of Artsy.
In 1908, Delaunay painted Yellow Nude, her most iconic early work, merging the wild colors of Matisse and the Post-Impressionist brushwork of Gauguin. A woman wearing nothing but black stockings lies atop a floral print pillow against a flat chevroned background. Her closed legs are
cropped from the portrait below the knee. Delaunay’s exuberant yellow, blue, green, orange and purple tones rival the bright color scheme of Philomene. The blue-green outlines around the vivid yellow of the woman’s body accentuate her skin’s glow. Contrary to avant-garde depictions of reclining nudes by male artists, Delaunay’s nude is not sexualized, though a large abdomen suggests she may be pregnant. Her eyes are shadowed yet there is a look of indifference on her face. There is but a slight hint of breast, a suggestion of nipple, and an obscured pubic region. Aside from the belly, she has an almost boyish figure that nearly bursts from the frame.
Marriage and Meeting Robert Delaunay
During her first year in Paris, Delaunay met the German art dealer and collector Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947), with whom she entered into a marriage of convenience on December 5, 1908. This allowed her access to her dowry and gave Uhde cover for his homosexuality. Through her marriage, she also gained entrance into the Parisian art world and had her first solo exhibition at Uhde's gallery, the Galerie Notre-Dame des Champs, in Montparnasse, where she met many leading painters of the time including Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958). In early 1909, Delaunay, nee Sonia Terk Uhde, met the Neo-Impressionist and Divisionist painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941). He and his mother, Berthe, the Comtesse de Rose, were regular visitors to her husband’s gallery. By 1910, Delaunay and Robert had become lovers and Delaunay found herself pregnant. She and Uhde divorced by mutual agreement and Delaunay married Robert later that fall. Their only child, Charles (1911-1988) was born on January 18, 1911. About her new husband, Delaunay said: "In Robert Delaunay I found a poet. A poet who wrote not with words but with colors". Some thirty years later, Robert died of cancer on October 25, 1941, at the age of 56.
Simultanéisme (1911-1913)
Along with Robert, Delaunay explored the possibilities of color in paintings influenced by the theories of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), who pioneered the concept of simultaneous contrast, defining it as the tendency for a color to appear to shift toward the complementary of its neighbor, both in terms of hue and darkness. They called their experiments in color and design simultanéisme (Simultaneism, from the Latin simul, meaning together), derived from the theories of Chevreul whose book on color theory, De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colours), had been published in 1839. In his book, Chevreul identified the phenomenon of colors looking different depending on the colors around them. The Delaunays defined Simultaneism as the reflection of the motion of color in light.
Quilt cover, 1911
Delaunay’s transition from perspective and naturalism in her art to geometric shapes and abstraction is dated by contemporary art critics to a patchwork quilt she made for her son’s crib in 1911. Now in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the blanket was created spontaneously using geometry and color. Speaking about the quilt, Delaunay stated:
About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son,
who had just been born, a blanket composed of
bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of
Ukrainian peasants.When it was finished, the
arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me
to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply
the same process to other objects and paintings.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Quilt cover, 1911.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Image courtesy of Art Blart.
In addition to the quilt for baby Charles, Delaunay’s interest in simultaneous contrast spread to collage, as well as book bindings, small painted boxes, cushions, waistcoats and lampshades. She wanted her art to be a way of life. She also invented in 1913 what she called the “simultaneous” dress (la robe silmultanée), a mix of squares and triangles of taffeta, tulle, flannelette, moiré, and corded silk.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Simultaneous Dress
(La Robe Simultanée), 1913. Image courtesy
of Minniemuse.
Unknown photographer, Sonia Delaunay in Simultaneous Dress, ca. 1913. Image courtesy of ArtBlart.
Casa Sonia (1917-1929)
During World War I and the 1920s, Delaunay went on to create more of these dresses, establishing her own fashion house in Madrid in 1918 called Casa Sonia that married art with fashion. The 1925 painting Robes simultanées (trois femmes, formes, couleurs) or Simultaneous Dress (Three Women, Forms, Colours) depicts three mannequins in front of a patterned changing screen. Founded in partnership with the French manufacturer Jacques Haim, Delaunay created costumes for plays and film, private commissions for celebrities such as the actress Gloria Swanson, men’s waistcoats, driving caps, coats and bathing suits. Unfortunately, the onset of the Great Depression forced her to close the business in 1929. In the 1930s-1950s, she ventured into textile and interior design, including drapery and carpets, with the Holland-based department store Metz & Co.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Robes simultanées (trois femmes, formes, couleurs)
Simultaneous Dress (Three Women, Forms, Colours), 1925. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Image courtesy of Minniemuse.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979). Coat made for Gloria Swanson, 1924. Image courtesy of Minniemuse.
Two models wearing fur coats designed by Sonia Delaunay and manufactured by Jacques Heim, with the car painted after one of Sonia Delaunay’s fabrics, in front of the Pavillon du Tourisme designed by Mallet-Stevens, International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris 1925. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Image courtesy of Phaidon.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Beachwear Designs, 1928. Image courtesy of Minniemuse.
Orphism (1911-1914)
In 1913, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a friend of the Delaunays, coined the term Orphism to describe their new post-Cubist painting style after the Greek god Orpheus who was known for his musical talents. Blending the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s (1859-1941) theory of creative evolution with experiments in symbolism and abstraction, Orphism is distinguished by faceted compositions, vibrant color, and contemporary subject matter that conveyed delight in modern life and its technological innovations. Unlike Pointillism, in which primary color dots placed next to each other are "mixed" by the eye and affect each other, Orphism was an offshoot of Cubism but with a new emphasis on color and the idea that painting should be kinetic, like music.
Le Bal Bullier (1913)
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Le Bal Bullier, 1913. Oil paint on mattress ticking, 3.9 m wide. The Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Khan Academy.
Among Delaunay’s first paintings in the Orphist style were several versions of a work entitled Le Bal Bullier (1913). The versions are nearly identical depictions of a Parisian dance hall that she frequented with her husband. The largest of these panoramic paintings measures over twelve and a half feet in length. It portrays abstracted couples dancing and twirling under circular lights who seem to blend in with the shapes around them. The emphasis is on the juxtaposition of blocks of bold color and contrast between light and dark. A sense of movement is created through the swirling pattern of paint.
Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914. Oil on canvas, 250 x 250 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Artsy.
Electric Prisms (1914), another defining work from Delaunay’s Orphist period, is both a celebration of color and modern life. Inspired by the freshly installed electric lamplights on the boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris, a new invention at the time, the over eight foot square canvas consists of several overlapping circles within which other circles increase in size from the center outwards, as though casting beams of light. Delaunay has divided the upper portion of the canvas into quadrants of primary and secondary colors with lines that intersect in the middle, where they darken in tone. Small squares of paint are interspersed in between the circular forms; interlocking rectangles, ovals, and arches of color populate the canvas. Unlike Bal Bullier,Electric Prisms is a purely abstract work except for a small stack of books inserted on the left side that includes a collection of modern poetry by Delaunay’s friend Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961).
The Simultaneous Book: La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Joan of France), 1913
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Last section of La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France),1913. Illustrated book with pochoir and hand-painted parchment wrapper. 196.9 x 35.6 cm unfolded, 18.4 x 10.5 x 1.6 cm closed. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image courtesy of The Art Story.
Apollinaire introduced Delaunay to the Swiss-born modernist poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars, the pen name of Frédéric-Louis Sauser, who became her friend and collaborator. She famously illustrated Cendrars’ 1913 poem La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France) which narrated the poet’s fictional 1905 journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway with “Little Jehanne,” a French prostitute, whose name is an allusion to Joan of Arc, the patron saint of France. In the poem, the poet and Jehanne travel from Moscow to Siberia, China, the North Pole, and finally to Paris, as suggested by the Eiffel tower motif–a famous symbol of modernity at the time–at the bottom left. Delaunay and Cendars called this merging of text with design “the first simultaneous book.” They believed that they were connecting the work’s visual impact to the thrilling simultaneity of modern life–the fast-paced, consciousness-altering dynamism brought about by innovations in transportation and communication.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France),1913. Illustrated book with pochoir and hand-painted parchment wrapper. Image courtesy of WikiArt.
Unlike the traditional book format that is read sequentially from page to page, this book is printed to unfold accordion-style to a nearly seven-foot long length on which text and illustration can be noted at once. When folded, the illustrated poem tucks into a parchment cover each hand-painted by Delaunay. The planned print run of 150 copies was purposefully meant to reach 300 feet high (if all copies are connected end-to-end)–the height of the Eiffel Tower. However, only about 60 copies were ever printed despite the sensation it caused in the art world. The simultaneous book was featured at Berlin’s 1913 Autumn Salon. Cendrars described the book as “a sad poem printed on sunlight.”
Legacy
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), Rythme Colore (Coloured Rhythm), 1968. Oil on canvas, 49 x 53 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. Image courtesy of The Art Story.
According to Artsy, “Sonia Delaunay’s innovative explorations of color and form were integral to the development of abstract art in the early 20th century.” Still a working artist into her eighties and nineties, one painting of note from Delaunay’s late career is Rythme Colore (Coloured Rhythm, 1968), painted when she was eighty-three. An Orphist piece, Coloured Rhythm borrows its circular theme from 1914’s Electric Prisms, infusing it with an overlapping pattern of squares and rectangles. Delaunay’s paint application varies from heavy to thick and light to dark, with brush strokes visible in some of the squares and rectangles. In the work, blue, red, green, and purple shades predominate with black, white, yellow, gray and tan accents that vary in hue and intensity. The overall effect is an exploration of color, geometry, and movement.
Sonia Delaunay died on December 5, 1979, in Paris at the age of 94. She was buried in Gambais, France, next to her husband Robert.
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