An innovator who lived her work
SONIA DELAUNAY Living art Bard Graduate Center, New York, until July 7
IN 1913 SONIA DELAUNAY made a patchwork dress from irregular pieces of fur, silk, velvet and cotton. Lemon yellow and cerise jostle with deep green, lilac and teal, set among shades of brown and black. When she wore it at the Bal Bullier on Paris’s Left Bank, it would have caught the lights of the dance hall, each patch interacting with its neighbour in a moving spectacle of colour. Guillaume Apollinaire described the dress’s attention-grabbing blend of elegance and fantasy. Blaise Cendrars wrote a poem about it. Delaunay and her husband, Robert, both central to the emergence of painterly abstraction at this moment, saw the dress as an example of their art of “simultanism”: the use of colour contrast, which creates specific effects in the eye of the viewer and captures the dynamism of modernity.
For the curators of Sonia Delaunay: Living art, the dress is emblematic because simultanism was also an avant-garde method that ignored the boundaries between fine and decorative arts, and between art and everyday life. They present it as a brand, too, and Delaunay not only as a tireless innovator in fashion, textiles, costume and interior design, but also as an astute promoter of her work.
Born Sara Stern in Odessa in 1885, Delaunay eventually settled in St Petersburg and took the name Sofia Terk, though she was always known as Sonia. By 1913 it’s “Delaunay” that rings out from the letterhead she designed for the workshop that she and Robert shared on the edge of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The circles and half-discs that shift and spin in their canvases – multicoloured shards and segments, vibrating in their contrasts – are here graphic devices that prove the artist’s modern credentials for potential clients. On the cover she designed for her solo exhibition catalogue in 1916, “S. Delaunay-Terk” hovers in yellow, blue, pink, red and green, above dilating concentric circles. The self-portrait she made for the back cover is now lost, but the curators note that she was still using a variant version in 1978, when it appeared on the cover of her autobiography, proudly associating her face with simultanism. Delaunay used abstraction to market herself and used herself to market abstraction.
It takes a moment to shift one’s thinking, to see these works on paper not only as examples of simultaneous contrast – objects from the history of abstraction – but also as advertisements for Delaunay’s work. To one school of thought this will seem like a distraction from (even a devaluation of) her artistic concerns. But the philosophy of simultanism refused such hierarchies. Getting dressed up and making a scene at a ball, selling art, making books: it was all part of her practice.
