Sonia Delaunay

22 May > 10 July 2021

ABOUT

1937. Sonia Delaunay in front of the panel ´Portugal' of the Railway Pavilion of the International Exhibition Arts and Techniques, Paris. ©Pracusa 20210319, fonds Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

A Sonia Delaunay exhibition in a Parisian gallery, in the middle of a pandemic, is a delight in more ways than one for those who love her wok, those who want to discover it and for those who believe in it for its own sake. What’s more, it is in the area she loved; her studio is just round the corner in the rue Saint-Simon.

Some have long tried to place her as having been born in a far-away province in the East. She is sometimes referred to as Ukrainian, Russian and occasionally Jewish. Sonia Delaunay is French by marriage to Robert Delaunay in Paris on 15 November 1910 at the town hall of the 6th arrondissement. The archives only give us a hint of her passports - all of them French - while her identity card issued in 1943 under the occupation, in which her photograph shows her in profile, as was common at the time and which leaves an indelible trace of the country’s subjugation to racist practices.

So, she was born in Odessa, the Russian city created by Catherine the Great of Russia according to the plans drawn by the Duke de Richelieu. The extract from her birth certificate issued by the Clerk of the Civil Court of First Instance of the Seine, attached to the marriage certificate leaves us in no doubt. Her birth is only recorded in the Civil register of Israelite births in Odessa: in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-five, on the first day of September, was born: Sarah, daughter of the reserve soldier Elie Stern and his spouse, Lady Hana. Odessa.

Sonia Delaunay was to span the century just as she was to cross Europe, in the opposite direction of the journey recounted by her Swiss friend Blaise Cendrars in La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France).
Never to return.

Russia, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal then Paris. Together they drew a map of Europe that scrolls through the whole century. Two world wars. We might be led to believe that she did not like the simplistic classification of small nationalist flags. We prefer to believe that Sonia Delaunay was the Parisian. The Parisian perfectly painted by Robert Delaunay in 1913 as in three canvases with the title Femme à l’ombrelle ou La Parisienne (Woman with Umbrella or the Parisian), of which one is in the Musée de Saint-Tropez, the second in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and the third, which belonged to Greta Garbo, was recently put up for auction.
She is the woman with the umbrella, the Parisian.

Let us say a few words about her work – it is being impossible to summarise 94 years of a life devoted to art. We will focus on an aspect of her work which we think deserves a special spotlight.
For a long time Sonia Delaunay only featured in conjunction with her glorious husband. Sometimes referred to as a follower. A designer!

Nothing of the sort.
Even though there was already a very long list of her earlier exhibitions in France and elsewhere, a major retrospective of her work (over 400 pieces) at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris from 16 October 2014 to 22 February 2015, Sonia Delaunay, les couleurs de l’abstraction (the colours of abstraction) is definitive proof.
Follower?

I do not believe that for a minute. Take for example the wonderful exhibition at the Basel Kunstmuseum, April- August 2008, Robert Delaunay. Hommage à Blériot (Homage to Blériot). An exhibition organised around a single canvas, l’Hommage à Blériot. This oil painting on canvas was painted by Robert Delaunay in 1914 and measures 250 x 250 cm. So as to set up a direct correspondence the museum managed to borrow Sonia Delaunay’s Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), a canvas dating from 1914 and measuring 250 x 250 cm, so exactly the same size, bought from the artist by the State in 1958. The two works squared up to each other – a confrontation between the two pieces did not put Sonia Delaunay at a disadvantage, quite the opposite.

We continue to believe that Prismes électriques, along with Udnie by Picabia, is undoubtedly one of the key pieces of Abstraction as shown in the memorable exhibition in 2003 at the Musée d’Orsay, Les origines de l’abstraction (The origins of abstraction).
More modestly, I took part in putting on an exhibition at the Galerie Art Focus in Zurich in 2001, from 2 March to 19 May, during which the conversation between the works by Sonia and Robert Delaunay gave no indication that those by Sonia Delaunay were inferior in quality to those by her husband. Quite the opposite. The exhibition included the extraordinary portrait of Tchouiko done in 1908, the other version of which is a masterpiece held by the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The pieces that galerie Zlotowski is showing us illustrate the artist’s singular journey. She always had a foot in both abstraction and figuration, was always looking for a different approach to making art. Any media was valid. A departure from an ancient way of thinking which would have locked the artist into a fixed genre from which the artist could digress only at great cost.

After many years spent studying these two artists, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the only words that come to me are those of Swiss painter Paul Klee regarding the key work by Robert Delaunay Les Fenêtres sur la ville, première étude, deuxième motif, (Windows on the City, first part, second motif) Paris, 1912. I quote from the journal Die Alpen, ca. 1912. “Delaunay has created the prime example of an independent painting, which, using a motif that is not from nature, leads a completely abstract existence.”

A description of abstraction, in simple, direct and concise language, which no-one understood at the time. And definitely not by Guillaume Apollinaire who was to marginalise Delaunay, Kupka and others by calling their work Orphism.*

We believe that Paul Klee could have said the same of Sonia Delaunay’s les contrastes simultanés (Simultaneous contrasts), oil on canvas, Paris, 1912, 46 x 55 cm. MNAM AM 4090 P. Donated in 1964 by Sonia et Charles Delaunay to the State.

Richard Riss Official Expert of Sonia and Robert Delaunay 24 February 2021

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

22 May > 10 July 2021

ABOUT

Sonia Delaunay

WORKS

Sonia Delaunay

Projet pour Chocolat

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Les Rochers de Montreux, projet d'affiche

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Portugaise aux fruits

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Scène d'intérieur

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de robe

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de robe

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de tissu

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Deux projets de tissu

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Groupe de femmes

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de costume d'homme

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Rythme couleur

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de couverture pour l'exposition Sonia Delaunay à la Nya Konstgalleriet de Stockholm

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Rythme syncopé

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de couverture

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Projet de couverture

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Rythme

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Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Autoportrait

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Sonia Delaunay

CONTACT