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Sonia Delaunay was born in Gradshik in Ukraine in 1885. Sara Ilinitchna Stern, known as Sonia Stern, was adopted by her uncle Henri Terk in 1890. She attended the Schmidt-Reuter studio in Karlsruhe, then the Académie de la Palette in Paris, where she settled in 1905. She painted Fauvist portraits and nudes.
For her first solo exhibition in 1908, she embarked on a work of abstraction, undertaking a cycle of canvases and drawings in which pure colours become planes that give rise to forms constructed by the depth of the relationships between the colours themselves. In early 1909, she met her future husband and artistic companion Robert Delaunay.
From 1913 onwards, the artist became interested in the creation of coloured fabrics and until 1935 devoted herself mainly to the applied arts (cushions, waistcoats, dresses, lampshades). She made bookbindings, covers and illustrations. She opened a decorating boutique (“Casa Sonia”) and then, with the couturier Jacques Heim, created the “Boutique simultanée” for the International Decorative Arts Exhibition in 1925.
In the 1930s, the Delaunays joined the Abstraction-Création group, which advocated non-figurative art. In 1935, she returned to painting and produced wall panels. With her husband, she took part in the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Paris and in the collective adventure of street art, encouraged by the Front Populaire. Her husband died in 1941, and Sonia retired to Grasse until the end of the war. In 1946, she co-founded the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and exhibited with the Art Concret group.
Always faithful to pure colour, exalted by the law of simultaneous contrasts, she continued to produce series, designed mosaics, stained glass, carpets and tapestries, made sets and costumes for the theatre and illustrated books. Sonia Delaunay died in Paris in 1979.
Collections
MaM (Paris) / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) / Centre Pompidou (Paris) / Design Museum Holon (Pinhas Eilon) / MoMa (New York) / Brooklyn Museum / Le Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes (Mulhouse) / Musée du Touquet (Paris) / Musée des Beaux-Arts (Liège)
