Artwork of the 80's
Side nav buttons CAM Home ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Timeline: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Styles & Movements: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Artists & Works: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Introduction:

Artists & Works
Sonia Delaunay
French, born Russia (1885-1979)
COMPOSITION (n.d.)
etching
19.5” x 15.5”

STYLE: ABSTRACT

  

Sonia Tirk Delaunay moved to Paris in 1905, where she met Robert Delaunay and worked in both fine art and fashion. The Delaunays became part of the Dada milieu, living their art in every part of their lives, and they also were leaders of Orphism, an attempt to soften Cubism with lyrical color. Delaunay’s clothing designs reflected new ways of thinking about the body and about identity. She returned to painting fulltime in the thirties and joined the Abstraction-Creation group. She was also active as a printmaker and designer. Her abstract works were displayed at the Louvre when she donated a large group of them along with the work of her deceased husband to the Musee National d'Art Moderne. Since her death, she has had many major retrospectives.

Sonia Delaunay’s committment to developing intense color abstract compositions did not change from the time she and Robert Delaunay were leaders of the Orphism movement in Paris. This print is typical of the style that Delaunay became known for, concentric bands of monochromatic half circles, and other basic geometric combinations.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian, 7/96
The bold, geometric clothing designs of Sonia Delaunay, a painter who once collaborated on fashions with Coco Chanel, are another highlight of the Portland Museum show. Delaunay, like Picasso, designed costumes for Diaghilev's avant-garde Ballet Russes, but her successes in the world of textiles and fashion took Cubism off the stage and into the streets, ready to wear.
Her dresses first appeared in Paris just before the war, in 1913-14, when she wore them to the Bal Bullier, a popular dance hall where artists and poets tried out new dances like the fox-trot and the tango. Delaunay's dresses were made from geometric scraps of various fabrics, combining taffeta and tulle, flannel and silk, in bright, contrasting colors, from violet and green to scarlet and blue. She dressed her husband, Robert, also a painter, with similar style. One account describes him as wearing "a red coat with blue collar, a green jacket, sky-blue waistcoat, a tiny red tie, black pants, red socks, blackand-yellow shoes." By the war's end, Delaunay could sell her designs from her own Paris boutique and attract such famous customers as the Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson. By 1923 her geometric patterns were being printed by a French silk manufacturer. Soon after, her garments could be found in London and New York department stores.
Fiona MacCarthy, The Guardian, 8/6/95
She worked with Robert on a series of Electric Prism paintings based on the effect of the newly installed electric lighting in the streets of Paris. This was the artist of the `Tango-Magic City', designing a futuristic age. For her friend Blaise Cendrars's modern epic poem La Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, a hymn to the Trans-Siberian railway, Delaunay created a `simultaneous' book, produced in a limited edition of 150. It concertina'd downwards to a length of two metres, colour, word and image merging. You could read it at a glance, speed being of the essence. Cendrars was ecstatic: `my poem is more soaked in colour than my life.' Sonia referred to herself and Robert as `two moving forces. One made one thing and one made another.' A reason for her own, long delayed, appreciation is that she did not follow the easily categorised, easel painter's route but chose to work in other mediums: embroidery, patchwork, bookbinding, ceramics. She has suffered not just from prejudice against women artists but also from the refusal to take seriously practitioners in the decorative arts. Delaunay saw her work as `noble', implicated as it was with the intimate rhythms of daily life, the fabric of the home. A weakness of this book is lack of context: a comparison with Roger Fry's Omega Workshop would have been valuable.