Looking at the Masters: Sonia Terk Delaunay

Artist and fashion maven Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was born in the Ukraine to a Jewish family. Her uncle Henri Terk and his wife adopted her when she was a child. He was a lawyer in St Petersburg, and his home was full of French art. Sonia had a governess who taught her English, French, and German. The artist Max Liebermann, a friend of the Terks, gave her a box of paints. She studied art in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 1903 until 1905, when she moved to Paris to study at the Academe de la Palette, a progressive art school. She met the Russian painters Kandinsky and Jawlensky, and Picasso, Braque, and Robert Delaunay, and saw the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and other Post-Impressionists. 

Delaunay was given her first solo exhibition in1908 at the Wilhelm Uhde Gallery. She married Uhde to remain in Paris because her parents wanted her to come home. When she met Robert Delaunay, she was “carried away by the poet in him.” She and Uhde divorced a year later, and she married Robert. Uhde explained the situation: “After a year our marriage came to an end.  A friend of mine felt he could make my wife more perfectly happy than I could.”

 

Both Sonia and Robert were painters influenced by Picasso and Cubism, but their early paintings lacked color. They named their style Orphism, after Orpheus, the famous musician of ancient Greek mythology.  The style also is known as Simultanism, a term coined by Guillame Appollinaire, the poet and play write. They said, “We have liberated color, which has become a value in itself.” Chevreul’s study of color in 1839 identified the phenomena of simultaneous contrasts: colors look different because of the colors that surround them.

Sonia created the Simultaneous Dress (1914) when she and Robert attended the hot night club Bal Bullier on Montparnasse in Paris. The dress is designed with a variety of color patches, similar to a patch work quilt. However, the patches reveal the shape of the body beneath the fabric. The bodice is divided in half. The right side defines the neck with the colors green and beige, the breast with black and dark green, the waist with gold, and the hip with a white crescent shape. The fabrics on the left form a multicolored pattern. The waist is green with a black semi-circle. The lower part of the dress is composed of elongated shapes pointing downward. The right side is differentiated from the left by a long dark green ruffle. Materials used in the dress are tulle, silk, flannel, and peau de soie. Robert’s outfit had a red and green jacket, red socks, yellow and black shoes, black pants, and a sky-blue vest. Guillaume Apollinaire described their outfits as “sculpture built on a living frame.” Blaise Cendrars, the poet and novelist stated, “On her dress she had a body.” 

 

Sonia wrote, “Before WWI broke out, Robert had shot off rockets in every way.  I, on the ground, had lit more intimate and ephemeral fires in everyday life.” The Delaunays were on vacation in Spain when the first World War started.  They lived in Madrid for a while and then relocated to Portugal.  They met Sergi Diaghilev, and Sonia was invited to design costumes for the opera “Cleopatra” in 1918, and “Aida.” in the Orphic style. The costumes, like her fashions, were created using fabrics in bright colors, and clearly were designed to accentuate the female figure. Sonia also established the Casa Sonia, a workshop and store that featured her clothes and fabrics, also lampshades, tableware, furniture, pottery, and household items. 

The couple returned to Paris in 1920. They opened their apartment on Sunday afternoons for artists, poets, writers, and intellectuals. It was the best- known salon in Paris. Sonia opened the Atelier Simultane studio in Paris, and she designed clothing for many well-known people, including actress Gloria Swanson and poet Nancy Cunard. She received commissions from Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer for the Bauhaus. She was commissioned in 1923 by a silk manufacturer in Lyon, France, to create 50 fabric designs. Sonia was one of the exhibitors at a Paris international exhibition of decorative arts in 1925. Other participants included the furrier Jacques Heim, Lanvin, Hermes, and Channel.

 

Sonia’s art was featured on the cover of the British Vogue Magazine in January 1925. She believed that color could be used everywhere and that clothing could be coordinated with an object. She designed the outfit and the car for the magazine cover. 

That same year, Citroen invited her to paint the Citroen B12 (1925) and design an outfit to wear with it. The CEO of Matra commissioned Sonia to paint the Matra M530, which had a fiberglass body and a Ford V4 engine and was manufactured from 1967 until 1972.

Sonia frequently knitted and embroidered the items she produced. The hand embroidered coat for Gloria Swanson” (1925) contains geometric designs that are created with a striking color palette.

 

At a distance the hand embroidered coat (1925) appears to be a luxurious fur. Sonia had learned to embroider as a child, and she used it frequently because it reminded her of Russia. She employed a couch stitch that holds the vertical wool threads in place with silk threads. 

 

Sonia designed everything, including shoes (1925). 

 

The Amsterdam department store Metz & Co. offered dresses by avant-garde designers, and it became one of Sonia’s most important clients. She worked for the firm for 30 years, starting in1925. Metz also sold her fabrics in America. Metz produced over 200 of her fabric designs, but the store’s archives had over 2000 of her sketches. Sonia’s husband Robert designed the first paper dress patterns, permitting people to produce their own Delaunay dresses. Paper patterns inspired the idea of ready-to-wear fashion.

Sonia’s knitting skill came in handy when she began to design and knit women’s bathing suits (1928). 

An album of her designs was published in 1928 in Paris.  The stock market crash of 1929 brought an end to Sonia’s fashion house; it closed in the early 1930s. She painted two large murals for the Air and Railroad Pavilion at the1937 Paris World’s Fair, and she received a gold medal. 

Robert died of cancer in 1941. Sonia moved to Grasse in the south of France with several other French artists. Some were resistance fighters. The Nazis confiscated the house, but Sonia remained in Grasse. She continued to paint and made plans to preserve Robert’s reputation. Exhibitions of his work and a catalogue raisonné (1957) were produced. She was made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in1958.

 

After the War, Sonia was again a major figure in the art world of Paris. She added jewelry, stained glass, and porcelain, but she continued to paint. Sonia was the first living woman artist to be given a retrospective in the Louvre in1964. She donated 177 of Robert’s paintings to the Paris Museum of Contemporary Art, better known as the Pompidou. She also received the City of Paris Gold Medal, and she was made a member of the Order of the Legion of Honor.

The Aubusson Tapestry company commissioned Sonia, Picasso, Leger, and Calder to create tapestries designs in 1967.  UNESCO’s first “International Women’s Year” poster (1975) was designed by Sonia Delaunay in the Orphism/Simultanism style that she and Robert invented. She was given her first American retrospective at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, in 1980. Major exhibitions of her work continue today, and fashion designers continue to be inspired by her work.

 

Sonia Delaunay died at age 94. Among her last words were “Je suis une optimiste (I am an optimist).

 

“I always painted as an amusement, and it amused me to do that, but this amusement took my whole life.” (Sonia Delaunay)

 

---

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years. Since retiring to Chestertown with her husband Kurt in 2014, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and the Institute of Adult Learning, Centreville. An artist, she sometimes exhibits work at River Arts. She also paints sets for the Garfield Theater in Chestertown.