Sonia Delaunay

1. Sonia Delaunay Ukrainian-born French Painter, Textile Designer, Fashion and Costume Designer Movements: Cubism, Orphism

2. Sonia Delaunay's career spanned the European continent, allowing her to reap the riches of the exciting advances by many avant-garde art groups. • Born and raised in Russia, she was educated in Germany and then France, making Paris her home just as modern art was finding a new way to find meaningful subject matter not dependent on realistic depictions of the world. • Sonia was one of the primary propagators of Orphism (a movement founded by her husband Robert), a theory wedding colour to form in order to achieve visual intensity on the surface of the canvas. • Delaunay extended the visual exploration of this theory to a range of fields beyond painting, developing an entire career in textile design. Context

3. By matching primary and secondary colours (red with green, yellow with purple, and blue with orange) to create a kind of visual vibration, Robert Delaunay developed a new type of expressive, abstract paintings. • He called this exploration "Simultaneous Contrast," but the movement became officially known as Orphism and Sonia was one of its chief practitioners. STYLE: Orphism

4. Spearheaded by Robert Delaunay, Orphism was a trend in abstract art that derived from Cubism, giving priority to light and color. • This focus on colour brought movement, light and musical qualities to the artwork and therefore referenced the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus, when naming the movement. • Orphist painters were interested in the geometric fragmentation of Cubism, but — unlike the Cubists, who removed almost all colour from their paintings, and rather like the Fauvists — they considered colour to be a powerful aesthetic element. He identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colours look different depending on the colours around them. • The Delaunays dispensed with form and aimed to created rhythm, motion and depth through overlapping patches of vibrant hues – creating a strand of Orphism known as Simultanism. Orphism

5. The Delaunay couple used Orphism to create non-objective imagery, the significance of which was based on the intensity of the expression that they could create with colour on the surface of the canvas. • They placed lines of primary colour beside those of secondary colour, understanding that the scientific effect on the eye of such combinations would result in art that could be just as scintillating to the viewer as those depicting a standard view of reality such as a figure reclining on a couch. • Their efforts produced a body of work that forced the viewer to experience their pieces visually - yet powerfully. Stylistic features

6. Sonia Delaunay's exploration of expressive colour in the field of textile design differentiates her significantly from other members of the contemporary avant-garde. • Besides designing, making, and selling garments in her own fashion boutique, she was responsible for costume design in a range of the performing arts including theatre and dance. • She ended up creating a line of textiles so significant that it was picked up by one of the biggest fabric manufacturers in Europe. DESIGN

8. Artwork description & Analysis: This image offers an excellent example of Orphism, the expressive combination of colour and form that dominated much of her career. The row of dancers spread out under dome lights positively bursts with patches of vibrant primary and secondary colours, illustrating her interest in the simultaneous colour theory. • This theory explored the visual effect of combining a primary colour with a secondary; a technical discovery that enabled artists to intensify the colours of their creations solely by manipulating the placement of colour on the canvas, without consideration to subject matter. • Twelve feet long, this painting was the largest of four versions and the first work exploring contrasting colours (blues and oranges, for example, placed side by side for maximum intensity) on such a large-scale. • The Bal Bullier dance hall on the boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris was a gathering place for avant-garde literary and art figures as well as students. Sonia and Robert were frequent attendees and there is no question that her depiction was inspired by her own experience.Le Bal Bullier exemplified Orphism perfectly by allowing the placement of color on the canvas to create both movement and energy. The bodies of the dancers are broken into abstract areas of bright color, which cause a kind of flickering reaction in the viewer, forcing him to work his way across the canvas and take in the spectacle described. • To maximize this effect Delaunay sets the dancers against a background where color is treated in just the same way, a red next to a green, a yellow next to a purple-blue, perfectly capturing the excitement and energy of this famous dance hall. • Although there is no attempt to present the world inside the hall with precision or photographic reality, the experience of those dancers under the bright lights, swirling around in couples, or as individuals, is absolutely captured. Oil on paint on mattress ticking - Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France Le Bal Bullier (Bal Bullier) (1913)

9. Artwork description & Analysis: Delaunay's passion for exploring the way complementary colours (one primary with one secondary) reacted to one another, was not contained to fine art. In fact, she boldly applied this expressive technique to areas in which artistic exploration was formerly not noted, such as the world of fashion and home décor. She eventually built a career on designing fashions for dresses, driving caps, swimsuits, shoes, and scarves. This dress is of particular importance because it was one of the earliest examples of her unique "simultaneous" dresses.The dress is created by sewing together oddly shaped pieces of fabric in non-uniform size and colour. The colour scheme, similar to one she developed in her paintings, manages to encapsulate a full range, including all the primaries (red, blue, and yellow) and secondaries (green, orange, and purple). Black, noted in the bunched fabric that wraps around the back and the collar, is used to contain the explosion of colour. The artist designed this type of dress for her friends, most certainly enhancing the visual effect of the dancers at the Bal Bullier. • Fabric patchwork - Private collection Simultaneous dress (1913)

10. Artwork description & Analysis: Design 1044 illustrates Delaunay's work in textile design. This light cotton fabric pattern is composed of overlapping oblong shapes of varying widths in shades of blue and green, broken up here and there with a pale yellow. The shapes are outlined in white, allowing the original color of the cloth to show through, and the overall pattern resembles the petals of a flower.Textile design was an important aspect of Delaunay's career. Although she had already designed and sold fabrics of her own design in 1925 when she met Joseph de Leeuw, owner and director of the Holland based department store Metz & Co., the friendship quickly developed into a business collaboration resulting in hundreds of fabric designs and lasting through the 1950s. Delaunay would produce designs, such as this one, in a number of different colour combinations; beyond the present one there is a version in red and orange palette, another in blue and purple, and one in brown and tan. Delaunay's work in this field elevated the field of fabric design to high art. Cotton georgette - Private collection Design 1044, fabric sample, Metz & Co. (1931)

11. Artwork description & Analysis: This large-scale painting measures almost twenty-three feet long and ten feet high and features a three-blade propeller anchored by a series of circles of various bands of color. Surrounding the propeller are depictions of mechanisms including gears and levers, metal disks, and wires in bright colors that project from a blue background composed of other, fainter, painted circles.This painting is one of a series that Sonia Delaunay made for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, an international exposition that took place in Paris in 1937. The commission marked her return to painting, garnered her a great deal of attention, and secured her financial security. Delaunay exhibited this work in the air travel pavilion alongside others she prepared on the same theme. The artist also created two works for the pavilion devoted to railroads, altogether creating a body of work celebrating the major advancements in transportation that had been made in recent years. Although focusing on the element important to the theme, in this case the propeller of a plane, Delaunay's passion for color and shape is apparent in this work: the mechanisms are rendered in vibrant shades, unlike those found in real life, on a background of colorful circles. • Tempera paint on canvas - Collection of Skissernas Museum - Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Lund, Sweden Hélice (Propeller), mural painting for the Palais de l'Air International Exposition, Paris (1937)

12. Collage task Choose one of Sonia Delaunay’s works and create a collage for your A3.

13. https://artblart.com/2015/08/05/exhibition-the-ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay-at-tate-modern-london/https://artblart.com/2015/08/05/exhibition-the-ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay-at-tate-modern-london/ • https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/sonia-delaunay • https://www.theartstory.org/artist-delaunay-sonia.htm Extra readings