| |
Sonja Delaunay
1885-1979
Like Marc Chagall, Nataliya Goncharova and her lifelong companion Mikhail Larionov, Sonia Delaunay emigrated from Russia to Paris in the first years of the twentieth century, joining Picaso, Matisse, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck in the remaking of art in the early moments of the Post-Impressionist era. Sonia Terk Delaunay settled in Paris in 1905, met and married Robert Delaunay in 1910, and joined with him in the development of Orphism, a movement based in Cubism but determined to bring new lyrcism and color to the rather severe works of Picasso and Braque. During the 1920s, she focused upon bringing this new artistic lyricism into the world of high fashion, transforming fabrics for fashion into a moveable artistic feast. In the 1930s, she returned to a renewed focus on painting, joining the Abstraction-Creation group in seeking to create an art based upon non-representational elements, often geometrical, and continuing to focus on color as central to painting. The group was trans-national, and including among its members Jean/Hans Arp, Jean Helion, Barbara Hepworth, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitsky, and Piet Mondrian. After her husband's death in 1941, she continued to work as a painter and designer, turning often to printmaking as well. In 1963 she donated 58 of her own works and 40 of herhusband's to the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and became the first woman ever to be exhibited at the Louvre during her lifetime the following year when the Louvre mounted an exhibition of this gift. Since her death, her importance in the development of abstract art can be seen in the number of major retrospectives and the number of books published about her as sampled in the bibliography below. In addition ot the etching illustrated below, we have recently acquired a number of pochoirs done in the 1920s and published c. 1930 which we will shortly be adding to the site. In an essay she wrote for her retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 1967, Delaunay wrote, of her experiments in color from the 1920s, "they were and remain ranges of colors, and based on the purified coneption of our [hers and her husband Robert's] painting. . . . My research was purely pictorial an d in plastic terms a discovery which served both of us in our painting. Rhythm is based upon numbers, for color can be measured by the number of vibrations" (Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay: The Life of an Artist [London: Thames & Hudson, 1995], 91-98).
Available work by Sonja Delaunay
If you would like to receive further information or if you need images, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery.
Please send requests via email to:
mail@ludorff.com
back to top
|
| |
