Sonia Delaunay

Leslie Camhi

Nearly two hundred works across textiles, mosaics, paintings, graphic design, and other media showcase the expansiveness of
the artist’s creative energy.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Da Ping Luo. © Da Ping Luo.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, curated by Waleria Dorogova and Laura Microulis, Bard Graduate Center, 18 West Eighty-Sixth Street, New York City, through July 7, 2024

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“Vroom, vroom, vroom!” A little French sports car, its chassis lacquered in exquisite blocks of ultramarine, cerulean, viridian, and crimson, guns its motor as it careens down the highway in the startling opening shots of Sonia Delaunay: Footage for a Monograph (1972). This brief documentary portrait of the artist, directed by her late-in-life assistant, Patrick Raynaud, is now screening in Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, an exhibition on view at Manhattan’s Bard Graduate Center.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Da Ping Luo. © Da Ping Luo. Pictured: Marcell Varga, ArtscaleM, 1:10 custom scale model of the Matra 530 designed by Sonia Delaunay in 1967, 2023.

Sonia Delaunay was in her eighties in 1967 when she designed the car, a Matra 530, for a charity event. A toy-size model is displayed at Bard in a third-floor room devoted to the émigré bohemian’s final years, when her paintings were at last celebrated with official French state recognition. Yet from the first decades of the twentieth century, in a life buffeted by the Russian Revolution, the two World Wars, and the Nazi occupation of France, she was extending art’s reach in unexpected directions, with energy, creativity, and relentless forward drive.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Bruce White. © Bruce White.

If survey courses in art history mention Sonia Delaunay at all, it’s usually in connection with her more famous husband, the painter Robert Delaunay. They were both key figures in the development of “Orphism,” a term coined by their friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to describe avant-garde artists who were leaving Cubism behind, embracing vibrant color and sometimes pure abstraction to express the clanging vitality of modern urban life. (Robert called their movement “Simultanism,” and New Yorkers will get a closer look at the phenomenon when Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 opens at the Guggenheim Museum in November.)

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Bruce White. © Bruce White.

Yet in recent years, Sonia Delaunay’s concurrent work in fashion, graphic, and interior design has garnered increasing attention, as museums grapple with multi-hyphenate creators and shifting perspectives regarding the once ironclad distinctions between fine and applied arts. At Bard, curators Waleria Dorogova and Laura Microulis have focused on the painter’s parallel pursuits, assembling nearly two hundred objects in a dizzying array of media—from works on paper to clothing, mosaic, and tapestry—to argue that this borderland where the concerns of high art meet the objects of daily life was also her native territory.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Bruce White. © Bruce White.

She was born Sara Elievna Stern, in 1885, into a working-class Jewish family in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire. (Biographical details are mostly drawn from the show’s extensive, scholarly catalog.) It was dangerous to be a Jew in Imperial Russia, as it would be in France decades later, and she learned early on to keep her origins at least partially hidden. At age five she was sent to Saint Petersburg to live with her maternal uncle, a wealthy lawyer, and his wife, who were childless and adopted her. They gave her a new, more Russian-sounding name—Sofia [aka Sonia] Terk—and introduced her to sophisticated currents in Western art and literature.

At eighteen, she left Russia to enroll in a school for “women painters” in Germany, decamping from there two years later to study in Paris, where she discovered Fauvism, hung out with other émigré artists in Montparnasse cafés, and began exhibiting her vibrantly colored, Gauguin-esque portraits and nudes. Her “starter marriage” in 1908 with the Paris-based, German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde ended shortly after he introduced her to Robert.

The two artists married in 1910, their domestic life a folie à deux in which they appear to have been remarkably well matched. In her autobiography, Sonia describes strolling down the Boulevard Saint-Michel with Robert at night, marveling ecstatically at the newly installed electric streetlamps: “the halos made the colors and shadows turn and vibrate around us, as if unidentified objects were falling from the sky, beckoning our madness.” A year after their marriage, the birth of their son Charles also sparked, for Sonia, an artistic revelation. She considered the patchwork cover that she created for his crib to be her first fully abstract composition.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Bruce White. © Bruce White. Pictured: Unglued sheets for La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913.

Their apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés became a hub for artists and writers, and Sonia was game to collaborate, with poet Blaise Cendrars, for example, on a landmark artist’s book, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913). Organized vertically in two columns, its accordian-like pages unfold to a length of six and one-half feet, with Sonia’s washes of largely abstract, luminous color accompanying the poet’s experimental verse, which recounts his train journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the 1905 Russian Revolution. A rare first edition is on view at Bard, beside a toy box Sonia created for little Charles, painted in a harlequin pattern, and a vest that she embroidered in a crazy quilt of colorful fabrics for Robert.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Bruce White. © Bruce White. Pictured, left: Gilet simultané (Simultaneous Vest), 1913. Center: Coffret à jouets (toy box), 1913.

Creative synergy! Canny self-promotion! The toy box would later be used in a filmed ad (screening in the next gallery) for Sonia’s burgeoning textile business in the 1920s and ’30s, when her playful, geometric-printed fabrics were marketed internationally as tissus simultanées—providing a key source of income when sales of the couple’s Simultaneist paintings proved slim. These woodblock-printed textiles, displayed together with delightful documentation of Sonia’s (sadly less profitable) 1920s haute couture atelier, are a highlight of the exhibition. So are her illustrations (on view in an adjoining gallery) of the robes-poèmes (“poem-dresses”) that she embroidered with calligraphic fragments of verse by Tristan Tzara, Iliazd (aka Ilia Zdanevich), and others—poetry winding around the garments’ waists or scattered over their sleeves—for Dadaist plays and madcap soirées.

Robert’s vest was more personal. She designed it for him to wear on Thursday evening outings to the Salle Bullier dance hall, where he acted as arm candy for Sonia, the main attraction, arrayed in her famous Simultaneous Dress. At Bard, this fragile, long-sleeved gown is on view for the first time in the US. Sonia sewed it by hand in 1913, piecing together bits of men’s tailoring cloth, velvet, silk, and fur. Accentuating its curvy silhouette, a deconstructed bustle in ruched black silk was intended to drape provocatively over the wearer’s left hip.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, installation view. Courtesy Bard Graduate Center. Photo: Da Ping Luo. © Da Ping Luo. Pictured: Robe simultanée, 1913.

A whiff of wild, long-ago nights emanated from this curious garment. Gazing upon it, I imagined the artist couple in their splendid, outrageous duds, walking billboards for modernity in the Paris of the Belle Époque. The century itself was young, its cataclysms still to come. This new era in art will be hybrid and feminine, the dress seems to announce, or it will not be.

Leslie Camhi is an essayist, memoirist, and literary translator (from French), writing for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. She is also a frequent contributor to art museum catalogs. Her first translation, of Violaine Huisman's novel, The Book of Mother (Scribner), was a finalist for numerous awards and long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.