Synopsis
Sonia Delaunay's career spanned the European continent, allowing her to reap the riches of the exciting advances by many avant-garde art groups. Born and raised in Russia, she was educated in Germany and then France, making Paris her home just as modern art was finding a new way to find meaningful subject matter not dependent on realistic depictions of the world. Sonia was one of the primary propagators of Orphism (a movement founded by her husband Robert), a theory wedding color to form in order to achieve visual intensity on the surface of the canvas. Delaunay extended the visual exploration of this theory to a range of fields beyond painting, developing an entire career in textile design.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Nu jaune (Yellow Nude) (1908)
Le Bal Bullier (Bal Bullier) (1913)
Le Bal Bullier exemplified Orphism perfectly by allowing the placement of color on the canvas to create both movement and energy. The bodies of the dancers are broken into abstract areas of bright color, which cause a kind of flickering reaction in the viewer, forcing him to work his way across the canvas and take in the spectacle described. To maximize this effect Delaunay sets the dancers against a background where color is treated in just the same way, a red next to a green, a yellow next to a purple-blue, perfectly capturing the excitement and energy of this famous dance hall. Although there is no attempt to present the world inside the hall with precision or photographic reality, the experience of those dancers under the bright lights, swirling around in couples, or as individuals, is absolutely captured.
Simultaneous dress (1913)
The dress is created by sewing together oddly shaped pieces of fabric in non-uniform size and color. The color scheme, similar to one she developed in her paintings, manages to encapsulate a full range, including all the primaries (red, blue, and yellow) and secondaries (green, orange, and purple). Black, noted in the bunched fabric that wraps around the back and the collar, is used to contain the explosion of color. The artist designed this type of dress for her friends, most certainly enhancing the visual effect of the dancers at the Bal Bullier.
La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913)
Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms) (1914)
This work also exemplifies the way that life influenced Delaunay's art. Apparently she and Robert were walking down the boulevard Saint-Michel when they came upon newly installed electric lamplights. Both artists tried to recreate the impressive glow from these new inventions in their artwork. In this painting we see how Sonia tried to replicate the way these artificial lights cast colors onto the sidewalk beneath with by sketching rapid, semi-circular colored lines. Sonia's efforts elucidates Chevreuil's claim that the manipulation of color can produce light on the canvas; that the combination of two colors can create a brighter effect or alternatively, a darker one.
Robes simultanées (trois femmes, forms, couleurs) (Simultaneous Dress [Three Women, Forms, Colors]) (1925)
Delaunay's career went well beyond the visual arts, including the design of interior decor, fashion, and fabric. This work directly refers to her activity as a fashion designer, showing the way that these arts intersect: art inspiring fashion and fashion inspiring art. The intersection between art and design can be noted in her work on Casa Sonia (1918), the set and costume design of Tristan Tzara's Le Cœur à Gaz (1923) and her textiles, which sold worldwide.
Design 1044, fabric sample, Metz & Co. (1931)
Textile design was an important aspect of Delaunay's career. Although she had already designed and sold fabrics of her own design in 1925 when she met Joseph de Leeuw, owner and director of the Holland based department store Metz & Co., the friendship quickly developed into a business collaboration resulting in hundreds of fabric designs and lasting through the 1950s. Delaunay would produce designs, such as this one, in a number of different color combinations; beyond the present one there is a version in red and orange palette, another in blue and purple, and one in brown and tan. Delaunay's work in this field elevated the field of fabric design to high art.
Hélice (Propeller), mural painting for the Palais de l'Air International Exposition, Paris (1937)
This painting is one of a series that Sonia Delaunay made for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, an international exposition that took place in Paris in 1937. The commission marked her return to painting, garnered her a great deal of attention, and secured her financial security. Delaunay exhibited this work in the air travel pavilion alongside others she prepared on the same theme. The artist also created two works for the pavilion devoted to railroads, altogether creating a body of work celebrating the major advancements in transportation that had been made in recent years. Although focusing on the element important to the theme, in this case the propeller of a plane, Delaunay's passion for color and shape is apparent in this work: the mechanisms are rendered in vibrant shades, unlike those found in real life, on a background of colorful circles.
Rythme (Rhythm) (1938)
Beginning in the 1930s Delaunay began to explore the subject of "rhythms." She was fascinated by the rhythm created by placing colors side by side, complementing and contradicting one another. As can be seen in this image, sometimes the colors blend together and make a larger shape (as with the circles on the top center of the canvas) while other times they work against each other (noted in the way some of the circles on the lower half of the canvas seem to break apart from each other). Delaunay captures the visual rhythm created by the moving or shifting of colors, as well as their interplay across the canvas. The artist described the process she underwent in exploring color as a "period of scales to discover harmonies and dissonances that give colors a life of their own, investing them with a pulse and vibrations which, when later put in order, become rhythms."
Rhythme colore (Colored Rhythm) (1968)
Thirty years after her first exploration of colored rhythm painting, there is a new development of geometric shape in her work. The rectangular shapes diminish the fluidity of the circular shapes. This change indicates the way she continued to explore her fascination with this theme throughout her career. As she wrote, "For me, the abstract and the sensual should come together. Breaking away from the descriptive line did not mean becoming sterile."