Sonia Delaunay
The rhythmist of colour.
Sonia Delaunay painted and designed textiles, clothes and cars in circles of strong colour. She was the first woman to have a retrospective at the Louvre in her lifetime.
Sonia Delaunay was born in 1885 into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine, originally named Sarah Stern. As a child she moved to a wealthy uncle in St Petersburg, who took charge of her upbringing and gave her the name Sonia Terk. She was able to travel and learn about art, and studied first in Karlsruhe in Germany.
In 1905 she came to Paris. She painted portraits in strong colours, influenced by Gauguin and Fauvism. In 1910 she married the painter Robert Delaunay, and the following year their son Charles was born. For the baby she sewed a patchwork quilt from coloured scraps of fabric, which she later described as the beginning of her abstract art.
Together with Robert she developed what they called Simultanism. The idea was that colours affect one another when placed side by side, creating movement and rhythm. Circles and arcs in strong colours became her hallmark. Bal Bullier of 1913, with dancing couples in a dance hall, is in the Centre Pompidou. The same year, together with the poet Blaise Cendrars, she made a book that unfolded into a two-metre-long picture and poem.
Delaunay worked just as readily on clothes, textiles and stage costumes as on painting. During the First World War the family lived in Spain and Portugal, and she designed costumes for the Ballets Russes. In the 1920s she ran a studio in Paris for textiles and fashion, and she even painted a car in her patterns. She saw no difference in value between fine art and design.
Robert died in 1941, and after the war she worked to secure his legacy. She herself went on working into old age. In 1964 she was given an exhibition at the Louvre, becoming the first living woman artist to be so honoured. She died in 1979. Today she is seen as a pioneer of abstract art and of the interplay between art and design.