Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was a pioneering and influential artist whose ground-breaking experiments in abstraction spanned the entire arc of the twentieth century.
Born in Russia and attending art school in Germany, Delaunay moved to Paris in 1908 and in the years that followed found herself at the heart of the avant-garde community at the dawn of Cubism.
Her marriage to Robert Delaunay in 1910 played a significant role in the development of the couple’s practice with the pair forming what was to become their own completely distinct abstract language. Leaning heavily on Sonia’s experience with Russian folk-craft melded with the dynamic of the Parisian avant garde, their work anticipated the experiments with colour and shape that would become the Delaunay hallmark style, simultané.
They were champions of one another and together they entertained and held salons. Among their friends were artists such as Kandinsky and Chagall, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
It is possible that Sonia Delaunay steered herself away from painting in the central decades of her life in order to look after their children and to give Robert the space to pursue his, so they could work alongside each other on their mutual projects without coming into direct competition. During this period Sonia turned to textiles and fashion designing fabrics for the Amsterdam luxury store Metz & Co., and latterly for Liberty.
Upon Robert’s death in 1941, Delaunay championed his legacy, spending years pushing for recognition of her husband’s practice rather than her own. It was not until the 1950’s that Delaunay began to re-apply herself to the painting practice she had begun almost forty years prior. The works on display here exemplify the essence of her early investigations into colour contrasts and narrate the development that took place in the latter half of her life, most notably in the series of intimate gouache works on paper entitled, Rythme coloré.
Indeed, the history of modernism as written by men, duly elected Robert his place in art history, but despite the freedom and ambition enjoyed by Delaunay in Paris her significance is still yet to be completely understood and the contribution of women in this period has been largely ignored. Thus, for a long time Sonia Delaunay has been seen as wife and intellectual companion of the more famous Robert, rather than the true pioneer she was and the ‘mother of abstraction.’
“The true new painting will begin when we understand that colour has a life of its own, that the infinite combinations of colour have their poetry and their poetic language much more expressive than by the old means. It is a mysterious language related to vibrations, the very life of colour. In this field there are endless new possibilities.”
Sonia Delaunay