Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Terk-Delaunay (Sarah Ilinitchna Stern), a French avant-garde artist, illustrator, sculptor and designer of Jewish origin was born in Ukraine. The master worked in the styles of cubism, orphism and abstractionism. There are a few facts that eloquently testify to the great significance of her contribution to the development of avant-garde art: she became the first artist whose lifetime exhibition was organized in 1964 in the Louvre, and ten years later she was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor. She was among the organizers of the international association “Abstraction-Creation”.

The work of Sonia who opened the interior and fashion boutique Casa Sonia in Paris expanded beyond painting and included many other arts. She became the greatest art deco master in the design of fabrics, wall coverings, clothes and accessories, and even her finds were widely used in advertising. The textile brand “Tissus Delaunay” and diverse works that included the concepts of geometric abstraction were successful at the International Exhibitions of Decorative Arts. In 1927, the artist gave lectures on the impact of painting on fashion at the Sorbonne.

Delaunay freely and easily moved from one technique to another, applied her vision in any field of activity – her goal was to bring art into everyday life. Cars fell into the field of her “decorative look”, she sold her ceramics, jewelry, clothes and furniture to a clientele, which included the art elite of Europe.

The master created illustrations for avant-garde literary works. The most famous are her graphic paintings of 1913 to a cubist poem by Cendrars, “Prose on the Trans-Siberian Express and Little French Jeanne”, a two-meter pleated book. The descriptive geometry of the drawings influenced the style of Paul Klee. In the same style, the artist completed the cover of the Vogue magazine in 1926. She worked with Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Soupault, Breton, Louis Aragon and other writers.

As a stage designer, Sonia Delaunay collaborated with Serge Diaghilev, carried out the entire set for the design of the play by Dada poet Tristan Tzara, and also created furniture and costumes for films of several directors.

Key ideas:

– Sonia Terk interrupted her short studies at the Karlsruhe Academy of Art (Germany) after reading the treatise “Manet and his circle” by J. Meier-Graefe. However, the Paris Academy of La Pallet with its academic lessons of Amedee Ozenfant and D. de Segonzac did not satisfy her – she preferred visiting galleries and museums to studying the basics of painting and drawing.

– Sonia’s first paintings belong to the Paris period – portraits, still lifes and landscapes painted in oil owe much to Gauguin, Van Gogh and the Fauvists. Bright colours seem to jump out of pictures. Her passion for colours determined her long career.

– A breakthrough that moved her from figurative work to abstract was a small quilt sewn for her newborn son Charles in 1911. Sonia combined Ukrainian folk craft with the Paris avant-garde and anticipated experiments with colour and form, which became her technique.

– Under the influence of Cubists, Sonia moved away from figurativeness to artistic geometry and abstraction, experimenting with rhythm and colour decomposition. She became a colleague and an active follower of Robert Delaunay in the development of the style of orphism – a special variant of cubism based on the dynamics of colours, visual revolutions and displacements of circular shapes. The term was coined by Delaunay’s friend, influential art critic G. Apollinaire. Referring to the singer of ancient Greek mythology Orpheus, he emphasized that such use of colour brings light, movement and musical qualities to the work.

– Delaunay used the principle of simultanism not only in painting, but also in numerous design developments. This name conveys the phenomenon of “simultaneous contrast”, when the colours of the palette look different depending on the neighborhood with others. For example, gray on a dark background looks lighter than on a light background. Sonia sought to create a rounded-smooth rhythm, depth and movement through overlapping sections of bright shades almost without recognizable objects.

– In the 1930s, the artist was close to the abstractionist searches of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hepworth. The couple organized the Paris Art Salon Realite Nouvel. In the postwar years, the organizing and creative activities of the artist were associated with a new heyday of Abstractionism.

– Delaunay formulated her key idea and the meaning of all her work as follows, “Praying to beauty has immense selflessness and a purely aesthetic element that ennobles life and turns it into love.”