Growing up in St. Petersburg, among the bourgeois society, Sonia Delaunay felt stifled. Moving to Paris as a young woman and marrying abstract artist, Robert Delaunay, it’s interesting that the very life she wanted to escape was what inspired her….Russian folk art. It was in 1911, while stitching together various colors and fabrics to make her son a blanket, that she realized what she created resembled Cubist art.
The Delaunay’s coined the term Simultanism, the optical illusion created when contrasting colors are juxtaposed. This was the very basis for Mrs. Delaunay’s 60-year career, which was filled with paintings, textiles and clothing. There were other experiences along the way: while residing in Madrid, Sonia opened Casa Sonia, a boutique for fashion and interior decoration. In the 1920’s, Delaunay opened Atelier Simultane and Sonia’s Fashion House, her own workshop for clothes and textiles.
Sonia returned to painting and did that exclusively throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Her constant search and investigation of color never ceased. Last year, the Tate Modern show became the United Kingdom’s first retrospective of Sonia Delaunay…long overdue!
Sonia Delaunay and two friends at the beginning of her career in her husband’s, Robert, Parisian studio.
Image courtesy of: Independent
Sonia Delaunay, Yellow Nude, 1908. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes
Image courtesy of: The Guardian
In 1925, Delaunay dressed models in her clothes and painted a Citroen B12 to blend in.
Image courtesy of: Love Art Not People