Sonia DELAUNAY (1885-1979)

Born in Gradizhsk, Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay was a painter, costume and textile designer, creator of fashion and of “simultaneous” objects. Born Sarah Stern in 1885 (died Paris 1979), into a poor family, she was adopted by an uncle, on her mother’s side, Henry Terk, who allowed her a life of opportunities. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts of Karlsruhe, Germany, she moved to Paris to study at the “Academie de la Palette”.

With her marriage, in 1910, to the painter Robert Delaunay, her artistic concentration shifted from painting to textiles and embroidery, transforming the Delaunay’s residence in an experimental environment. It was at this time, the beginning of 1911 that she created one of the first abstract works of art in history: the blanket for her newborn baby. Although done in the traditional technique of the quilt, it was made according to a research technique that she had developed: simultaneous contrasts. We can see the same technique applied to the clothes that she made for herself, that inspired the poet Blaise Cendrars to write “About the Body, She Has a Dress”, a poem about the new relation between art and daily life (in 1913, the partnering of Sonia and Cendrars would bring about La Prose du Transsibérien or Transiberian Prose). In this same year Sonia’s simultaneous objects– book covers, lampshades, cushions and carpets– were exhibited in the Der Sturm Gallery, in Berlin.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the couple, invited by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Eduardo Viana, left Paris and traveled to Portugal. The whiteness of the meridian light inspired Sonia to deepen her research in the field of light. Again she dedicated herself to painting and drawing, and as a consequence her work started to mirror the colours of the regional Portuguese folk culture, by recreating, with the solar circle language, traditional dolls, pottery and women’s clothes in moments of dance. Also in the canvas Chanteur Flamenco (1915), a vibrant composition, of centrifugal dynamics, she evoked her close relation with music and the desire make colours dance. Although recognizable, these figures articulated themselves as a pretext in the sense of abstraction, leaving colour to echo in space and unfold light in its multiple forms.

In 1918, in Madrid she started to collaborate with Diaghilev by designing the costumes for the “Ballets Russes”, and at the same time opened the Sonia House, where she sold dresses and fashion accessories. The return to Paris, after the war, allowed her to establish connections with the Surrealists Breton and Aragon. At the same time she continued designing textiles and decorative objects, as well as the robes-poèmes (possibly influenced by Portuguese scarves used in courtship), and dresses with embroidered poems. Her growing prestige was also a result of the Boutique simultanée (1924-30), situated in the Champs Elysees. The rejection of the hierarchy between fine arts and the applied arts became clear with the process in which Sonia framed her models in the compositions or the work’s aesthetic integration into daily life.

Successful, well known through her work and patronised by cultural institutions all over the world (in which reference should be made to the exhibition organised in 1958, in the Kunsthaus of Bielefeld, and another the Museé du Louvre in 1963, which was made possible thanks to donation of one hundred and seventeen works by the Delaunay couple to the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris), Sonia remained open to new challenges. In 1953, she joined the recently formed group Espace. Nevertheless, she did not forget the past and published her research in a book named The Colour Danced. Fifty Years of Research. In the sixties she was acknowledged by various institutions in the United States, and the confirmation of her status came, with the large retrospective, organised by the National Museum of Modern Art, in France.

In 1972, in order to remember the work and the relationship of this artist to Portugal, Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation organised an exhibition called Sonia and Robert Delaunay in Portugal: and their Friends Eduardo Vianna, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, José Pacheko, Almada Negreiros.

Throughout the sixties Sonia continued to experiment with new areas and techniques of expression, designing stained glass and mosaics, and making editions of lithographs. In all of these works we can see how the colours open with light, transform and multiply theirselves, contrasting with their complements. Different tones of the same colour reacting to the changing values, as if colour and light were two faces of one coin, as if this form of visual dance, desired and generally achieved, plays with the geometrical sketch of the drawing and pursues the ambition that became the title of her 1978 autobiography: We Shall Go Until the Sun.

EMÍLIA FERREIRA