DELAUNAY Sonia

Sonia Delaunay, born Sophie Stern or Sara Illinichtna Stern on November 14, 1885 in Gradizhsk, Ukraine, and died on December 5, 1979 in Paris, was a Ukrainian-born painter. Adopted by her maternal uncle Henri Terk, whose name she took, she did not study fine arts extensively: she studied drawing in Karlsruhe for two years, then in Paris at the Académie de la Palette in the Montparnasse district. She became a French citizen through her first marriage to Wilhelm Uhde in December 1908. After a Fauvist period likely inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, she, along with her second husband, invented a form of painting that Apollinaire defined with the vague term of Orphism, which did not correspond to any real trend. Sonia and Robert Delaunay mainly worked together on the search for pure color and the movement of simultaneous colors, a trend that inspired other painters after them, notably Fernand Léger and Jasper Johns. Increasingly oriented towards abstract art over the years, she founded the Salon des réalités nouvelles in 1946 solely to promote abstraction. She left behind a prolific body of work that also included printed fabrics, artist's books, and haute couture dresses, including the famous dress for Nancy Cunard. Her first textile work was a blanket for her son Charles. Opinions are divided on the appreciation of her textile work. Michel Seuphor believes that she may have been too confined to fashion: "I personally regret that for many years, Sonia Delaunay, instead of devoting herself entirely to painting, dispersed her talent by trying to introduce the simultaneous ideas of her painting into fashion." In a more recent assessment, Jacques Damase recalls that the patterns invented on fabrics by Sonia brought a new inspiration to painting: "It is not unimportant for the historian that her works predate those of Mondrian," and that the fabrics still serve as inspiration for a whole generation of young painters. Always associated with her husband Robert in painting, fashion, or monumental ventures like the fresco intended for the Palais des chemins de fer for the 1937 International Exhibition, she is often exhibited with him at the Centre Pompidou, to which she made several donations. While many museums around the world own her paintings, the majority of them are shared in France among the musée de Grenoble, the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Centre Pompidou, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.