Sonia Delaunay Research Articles

Fashioning simultaneous migrations: Sonia Delaunay and inter-war Romanian connections

This article analyses the connections between the worlds of fine art and fashion through the complex interconnections between the Parisian-Eastern European creative exile. It follows the common threads between Ukrainian-Jewish artist and fashion designer Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) and prominent inter-war Parisian Romanians: namely, Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brâncuși and Lizica Codreanu. I suggest the concept of ‘simultaneous migrations’ to illustrate fashion’s mobility beyond and across cultural differences, identities and aesthetics through Sonia Delaunay’s philosophy of Simultaneity, focusing on her inter-war Romanian connections in Paris. The research bridges across the fields of fashion studies, art history and cultural studies, in order to explicate the synapses that shed light on Sonia Delaunay’s ideas of Simultaneity and colour theories to Paris as an ideological, cultural, artistic and identity hub.

Sonia Delaunay, ‘Living Profoundly’

This essay examines Sonia Delaunay's efforts to promote her simultaneous dresses made in 1913–14. Departing from traditional art‐historical accounts which treat Robert Delaunay's simultanism as a painterly, modernist practice, I situate Sonia Delaunay's fashions and her attendant publicity as an avant‐gardist move from art into life. Throughout, the essay traces how Delaunay strategically photographed herself wearing her dresses and promoted the circulation of such photographs within the popular and avant‐garde press as a means of generating visibility and attention for herself as a (woman) artist. Highlighting the gendered constraints that originally led her to the applied arts, the essay ultimately argues that Delaunay offers an early and alternative art‐into‐life narrative of the avant‐garde: one in which a woman artist embraces the everyday and the decorative arts only to turn that embrace into a highly visible, public, and sellable production.

Colour, movement and modernity in Sonia Delaunay’s (1926) fashion film

Sonia Delaunay is best known for her abstract and colourful style which is manifested across her artwork, fashion, textile and interior designs alike. In 1926, this culminated in a fashion film, titled ‘L’Elégance’. Shot using the Keller-Dorian colour process, the film features a succession of Delaunay’s simultaneous fashion and textile designs. This article explores the implications and origins of the film, considering technological, cultural and social factors. It focuses on the themes of colour and movement that were essential both to the film and Delaunay’s philosophy at large and were strongly related by Delaunay and her contemporaries to modernity and women’s liberation. The author positions Delaunay’s earlier work as a form of proto-cinema and demonstrates how her film uniquely transfers aesthetic and cultural themes. She explains why fashion film was a necessary step for Delaunay and how she employed notions of temporality to further fashion film as an avant-garde form.

Theorizing Style (In Three Sketches)

Style is often saddled to a process of attribution and authorship, where it is deployed to qualify and distinguish between particular genres. Within art and design, these tend to be institutionally coded, such as “Bauhaus” style, or chronologically restricted, as with “Art Deco.” In this paper, I sketch out three ways in which style can be theorized as a transformative force, and not simply a referential schema. The three sketches introduce an understanding of style developed in the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Anne Sauvagnargues and the design practice of the Russian-French Avant Garde artist Sonia Delaunay. Through them, I develop a specific reading of style as a practice rather than as a genre that characterizes a brand or individual. By understanding style as practice, I seek to foreground an expressive capacity of style that is altogether asignifying, impersonal and transversal, as an injunction for rethinking the style of social-scientific research practice.

Modern designs inspired by Sonia Delaunay`s art

Abstract This study is an analytical Study of the sensational visual artist and designer Sonia Delaunay ,who was able to interlace the art of design with the prevalent fine art at that era, and it's an analysis for her artworks in favor to be inspired and influenced by her artistic touch to make trendy fashion designs. One of the main objectives of this study is to determine theartist's artistic print and build on that, modern and unique designs for women and also to know their level of acceptance and satisfaction harmoniously with the specialists. Arabic library is deficient in resources that major in the fine art and its relation with the art of fashion design. As subsequent this study has the potential to be a source in the Arabic library. In fact, the researcher has chosen a descriptive and analysis methodology design for her study because of her extensive study of Sonia Delaunay's artworks in order to present modern illustration designs influenced by Sonia Delaunay style. The outcome of this study has shown mixed views for the suggested illustration designs from the colors and Designs perspective and the consumer's opinion about wearing them out in public. These following designs (number 2 ,6,8,9,11,13, and 15) show the highest rate of acceptance. On the other hand, designs (number 1,3,5,10, and 12) scored the lowest. Lastly, each of these designs (number 4, 7, and 14) reveal an equal acceptance. The researcher recommends more studies about the modern arts and their connection with the art of fashion designs. Also, she recommends to extend the researches on Sonia Delaunay personal and professional lives. The future researchers can include different aspects in their studies since Sonia Delaunay's artworks are very motivational and applicable in various forms like designs, fabrics, and furniture designs, Many references were used that feed the research and enhance information, the most important of them SONIA DELAUNAY: THE COLORS OF ABSTRACTION by Butterfield-Rosen 2014 and color move:art & fashion by soina delaunay by matilda mcquaid ,susan brown 2011, Many museums were also used to document various artworks, the most important of them is Art Moderne de la Ville de Pari’Museed Sonia Delaune 3D Museum in Paris .

Pure Painting and Mottled Colour

On the eve of World War I, Guillaume Apollinaire announced the birth of ‘pure painting’. Scholars have typically understood this as an early version of mid-century theories of abstract art; however, that interpretation ignores the poet’s close association with Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Those artists were deeply influenced by M. E. Chevreul, a nineteenth-century colour theorist who showed that complementary hues appear more pure when seen simultaneously. Most often discussed in relation to the phenomenological changes that occur when red and green are viewed side-by-side, simultaneous contrast suggests an alternative view of purity. For the Delaunays, pure painting was not a retreat from the world, but a way of making its dichotomies and conflicts more visible.

La mujer en la primera abstracción geométrica: una "contra-historia" artística en clave de género

Este trabajo es un intento de rescatar las creaciones artísticas femeninas de la primera abstracción geométrica. Recurre, por un lado, a la reescritura del arte moderno de la estética de Jacques Rancière, basada en el valor de la igualdad y en la idea de dar voz a aquellos que no la tuvieron en el relato artístico clásico. Suscribe, por otro lado, el espíritu revisionista de la estética actual, su replanteamiento del valor de la libertad, en cuyo nombre se sigue denegando aún hoy el estatuto artístico a las formas expresivas consideradas no-libres. Se establece así un paralelismo entre la situación de la artista moderna y la de las llamadas artes menores, ambas excluidas del “gran arte” por su falta de libertad y ambas dignificadas, sin embargo, en la obra no-objetiva geométrica de mujeres como Liubov Popova, Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers y Marlow Moss.

A Long-Distance Call? Social Space and Corporation Nouvelle’s Places of Production

This article analyses the spatial practices of a collective art project developed by Corporation Nouvelle, a group of modernist artists working in Portugal during the First World War. It investigates its formation and activities, while discussing the relationship between the ultra-peripheral places where these activities were designed, and the transnational-cosmopolitan profile that the group developed. The article revisits some well-known data on Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (1887–1918) and Corporation Nouvelle’s operations, resting on two interlocked theoretical determinants: the first questions the way we tend to think about space and place as objectified categories; and the second discusses how in art history the notions of center and periphery tend to operate as geographical locations and to function as discrete categories. The case study of Corporation Nouvelle helps to show that such binary opposition is far from exhausting the ways in which peripheral places are perceived and lived. It is also utilized to argue that geography matters: places of production are not mere locations but social constructs that entail a dialectical relationship between the perceived, the conceived, and the lived.

La alianza de arte y poesía en las vanguardias: los vestidos-poema de Sonia Delaunay

Este artículo presenta un estudio y análisis detallados de los vestidos-poema (robespoèmes) de Sonia Delaunay (1922-1923), un claro ejemplo de creación vanguardista basada en la síntesis de pintura y poesía. Se proporciona una recopilación de estos vestidos poemáticos, así como la transcripción y autoría de los poemas incluidos en ellos. A lo largo del artículo se analizan los vestidos-poema desde una perspectiva de género. Se vinculan, así, a una noción del arte de vanguardia comprometida con la idea de la fusión de arte y praxis vital; y se calibra, en consecuencia,el papel desempeñado en este terreno por las artistas de las vanguardias históricas frente al de sus compañeros de filas masculinos.

ART DECO STYLE’S FEATURES IN THE TEXTILE WORKS OF DESIGNERS SONIA DELAUNAY AND PAUL POIRET

Art Deco is an artistic term that stands for an elegant eclectic design style dating back to the 1920s. Style has affected virtually all industries, including architecture, fine arts, applied arts, interior design, industrial design, fashion and jewellery, as well as painting, graphics and cinema. Art Deco architecture and arts expanded on other movements - Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism, Bauhaus, and Futurism. Principles of Constructivism and Cubism are also used in contemporary textile patchwork and quilt. The aim of the paper: exploration of the features of Art Deco style in the textile works of 20th century designers - Sonia Delaunay and Paul Poiret. The methods of the research: exploration of theoretical literature and Internet resources, the experience of reflection.The research emphasizes Sonja Delaunay’s particular importance of textile works in the development of contemporary quilt in the 21st century.

От лоскутного одеяла к авангарду

A patchwork blanket has a status of a very specific art-object and its role is very important in culture of the 20th century due to its dose association with folk art and Avant-garde art. It was in 1911 when famous avant-garde artist Sonia Delaunay made a patchwork blanket for her son Charles. She had seen similar patchwork items in her childhood. That blanket was made from rectangular or square patches, but some were of irregular shape. Sonia and Robert Delaunay carefully observed the blanket and noticed that the combination of red, black, and beige colours of the textile patches reminded them of the Cubist painting. They also noticed that the use of contrasting colours brought the feeling of dynamic space into a two-dimensional artwork. This was one of the great discoveries that allowed artists to form their own movements: Orphism or Simultaneisme. While Robert Delaunay was making simultanist art, Sonia used simultanist ideas in the production of new textile designs and fashion. Geometric patterns of the fabric samples reflected the Avant-garde Zeitgeist, and the colour combinations of the patches reflected the simultanist contrasts. The simultanist dress made by Sonya in 1913 was the most famous of her works in the field of fashion. In the future, she established her own style in the design producing textiles with simultanist elements closely connected to the technique of patchwork. Thus, we can see that the patchwork blanket had a powerful effect on the development of Avant-garde art and design in the 20th century.

Small presses and literary/artistic collaboration in the U.S. after 1945: The examples of The Black Mountain Review

The early 20th century European avant-garde movements have extensively shown the connection existing between the activity of independent publishers and the practice of literary/artistic collaboration. Such works as La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France (Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, 1913) or Facile (Paul Eluard and Man Ray, 1935), would have never been published if the little review Les hommes nouveaux or the small publisher G.L.M had not acted as facilitators to allow those works to reach an audience. The artistic and publishing context of post-war America, though different from that of pre and post World War I Europe, presents interesting parallels concerning the role of small presses in encouraging the activity of collaboration between artists and writers. By exploring the work of daring editors and publishers as Robert Creeley (The Black Mountain Review), Jonathan Williams (Jargon press), and more recently, of Steve Clay (Granary Books) it is possible to see how, during the latter part of the 20th century, American avant-garde poetry found a way to circulate and to express its unique voice by its association - and most of the time by its collaboration - with the visual arts. In the 1950s Creeley insisted to match, in the seven issues of The Black Mountain Review that he edited, the most innovative poetry of the time with the reproductions of works by contemporary artists, and this in a way that was totally unique at the time. Jonathan Williams, through his Jargon series of well-crafted books, echoed Creeley’s work and put an even stronger emphasis on the activity of collaboration between the artists and the writers that he chose to publish. In more recent times (1980) Steve Clay took on the movement started years earlier by Creeley and Williams and, by establishing his publishing house known as Granary Book, began publishing a long series of collaborative works where the specificity of the writing is directly embodied in the material aspect of the book.

Sonia Delaunay and Simultanism

The life and work of Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), especially her clothing and textile designs as reflections of the theory of Simultanism, are the focus of this article. Also discussed are her works for the Ballets Russes and other theater companies, her commercial undertakings, the impact of her color theory on Russian artists such as Georgii Yakulov, and her connections with the Paris avant-gardists such as André Lhote and Tristan Tzara.

Sonia delaunay: a life in the avant-garde.

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colourful work spanned painting, fashion and design. In 2015, Tate Modern in London presented the first UK r...

Threading Jewish Identity

This essay aims to understand and contextualize the Jewish identity of the artist Sonia Delaunay, who, in 1885, was born Sara Stern to a poor family in Gradizhsk, southeast of Kiev in Ukraine, well within the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian Empire permitted Jews to live. This essay argues that her early surroundings in Ukraine affected the formation of both her aesthetic and Jewish identity. From the age of seven, she grew up in St. Petersburg, in the home of her rich maternal uncle. Rather than looking for intentional Jewish content or motifs in her art, this essay attempts to tease out the ways that her life engaged Jewish culture—from the folk culture of her early childhood in Ukraine and her sophisticated adolescence in St. Petersburg, to art school in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the worlds of avant-garde art and haute couture in Paris. Any public acknowledgement of her Jewish identity was limited by her awareness and experience of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France. The bold self-image she projected as a modernist and as an outsider, coupled with her eager embrace of the new, reads as her individual response to traditional society's rejection of the Jews.

‘Dress Poems’

In the early 1920s Tristan Tzara produced short experimental ‘robe-poèmes’ [dress-poems] which were incorporated in representations of female figures by Sonia Delaunay. Two poems have been transcribed in French and translated here for the first time into English.

Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde by Juliet Bellow

Reviews 279 virtually impossible to infer.Amer’s“excavation”of Islamic teachings and prescriptions, as they pertain to women’s dress and sociocultural and political behavior, is detailed and thorough. She reveals that “new research [...] has unearthed the extraordinary political and social role played by Muslim women in the early history of Islam” and, therefore, more modern, restrictive ordonnances meted out by hardliners, clearly demonstrates that such interpretations“are nothing but imposed constructions”(47). Additionally, the author takes to task Western depictions of Muslim women that have contributed to enduring stereotypes. Hollywood also has created many negative meanings associated with Muslim veiling that have“voided”any“spirituality and faith” and,in their place,instilled the garb with sexual fantasy,“erotic fulfillment,and prospects of penetration and possession”(78).Amer concludes with a chapter on veiling through the arts as articulated in Muslim countries around the world. She notes that artists are increasingly taking active roles in contemporary debates about women and the veil. The veil has become a forum for actively challenging “the homogenization of Muslim women” and, thus, contesting their perceived lack of subjectivity and agency (176). Amer offers a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the hijab which provides a holistic approach to a subject that in our post-9/11 era often leads to divisiveness rather than common understanding. University of Maryland Valérie K. Orlando Bellow, Juliet. Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4094-0911-3. Pp. 280. $120. Through a close reading of four works, Bellow offers insightful commentaries about Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and its diverse art forms inspired by Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) during the interwar years. The book features numerous exquisite paintings, sketches, and stills of costumes and set designs that offer a first-hand account of the multi-media form at the heart of the troupe’s productions. The author sheds light on the fusion of art forms and explores the aesthetic shifts taking place in dance at the beginning of the twentieth century, marking a departure from the classical ballets of famed choreographer Marius Petipa, through an in-depth study of Ballets Russes’s productions and how audiences reacted to them. Bellow explains the blurred boundaries between art and entertainment in interwar Paris as she examines the ways in which the troupe’s productions attempt to create new connections in the plastic arts, music, and dance. Divided into five chapters, Modernism on Stage focuses on four ballets designed by canonical modernist artists: Pablo Picasso and Parade, Sonia Delaunay and Cléopâtre, Henri Matisse and Le chant du rossignol, and Giorgio de Chirico and Le bal. Through Bellow’s work we come to better understand how the relatively new medium of cinema played a significant role in Picasso’s aesthetic approach to Parade; we delve into Matisse’s “Oriental”-inspired costumes and set design for a production generally considered a failure, particularly as very little has been written about this work; we also learn about the fragmentary yet fanciful approach de Chirico applied to both the costumes and sets of Le bal. It is in this final chapter that Bellow tackles issues that, in our digital age, have become critical: “What happens to works of art (and artists) when they grow old? Who is charged with their maintenance and upkeep? With their legacy?” (239). The chapter entitled “Fashioning New Women: Sonia Delaunay and Cléopâtre” deserves special attention, as Bellow’s detailed study of Delaunay’s complex role as an artist and mannequin places an often neglected emphasis on the role of women as both producers and consumers of culture in the early twentieth century. Bellow broadens our perspective of art as a destabilizing force and asks us to reconsider Wagner’s notion of a new form of total artwork and its relevance to contemporary works. As Bellow includes many illustrations and relevant details, the reader is immersed in the artistic universe of the Parisian Avant-Garde, which enables her to see the originality of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at its best. Finally, it should be mentioned that the bibliography provides ample reference for...

Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

True to their artistic goal of forging an alliance between dance and the other arts, the Ballets Russes worked in close collaboration with some of the foremost painters and musicians of the time. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, the rich intermedial exchanges between painting, music, and choreography on the Ballets Russes stage have received little critical attention until now. This blatant gap is filled by Juliet Bellow's masterful study of the interactions between sets, costumes, performance, and musical accompaniment in four exemplary ballets designed by Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Matisse, and De Chirico. An introductory chapter maps out the evolution of choreographic style from the ‘oriental’ Schéhérazade (1910) to the modernist Le Sacre du printemps (1913), and examines the changing discourses in the reception of Ballets Russes productions. While Fokine's seemingly improvisational and instinctive dance language was hailed as a liberation of the body from the ills of civilization, the convulsive choreographies introduced when Nijinski took over as the troupe's lead choreographer not only generated controversy but challenged the racialized vision of Ballets Russes dance as a type of unmediated, ‘primitive’ art form. Chapter 2 looks at the complex ways in which Picasso referenced film in his set designs for Parade (1917) as a means of exploring new modes of spectatorship and experimenting with corporeality in space. Chapter 3 examines the crossover between ‘high’ and decorative art in Sonia Delaunay's costume designs for Cléopâtre (1918), paying particular attention to the articulation of female agency in her garment for the title character. In Chapter 4, Bellow offers a fascinating reading of the shifting definitions of the ‘oriental’ and the ‘decorative’ with regard to modernism in Matisse's designs for Le Chant du rossignol (1920). Finally, Chapter 5 examines De Chirico's disjunctive approach to classicism in the costumes and sets for Le Bal (1929) as an attack on the total artwork's promise of a harmonious union between different art forms. Through these case studies, the author explores wider questions of the modernist body, changing modes of spectatorship in the first decades of the twentieth century, the relationship between technology, performance, and the natural world, the tensions between elite art and popular culture, and, not least, the inherent conflict between the totalizing gesture of the nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk, which the Ballets Russes consciously embraced, and modernism's insistence on the autonomy of the arts. Elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated, this wonderful book offers a fascinating journey through the rich intersections between music, painting, the decorative arts, and performance on the Ballets Russes stage. What is at stake here is no less than a rethinking of the concept of modernism from an intermedial perspective. Modernism on Stage is a tour de force not to be missed by anyone interested in the Ballets Russes and the Parisian avant-garde.

Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay

Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay's Robe Simultanée: Modernity, Fashion, and Transmediality

This article considers Sonia Delaunay's “simultaneous dress” of 1913. Delaunay's art and fashion are significant not only since they unfold from a context of radical fin-de-siècle thought relating to psychophysics and the fourth dimension, but crucially, she relocated the site of knowledge to the body. For Delaunay, this move restored emphasis to embodiment as the active producer of experience, and also as the condition from which subjectivity is issued. Delaunay refigured her body into something simultaneous and dynamic with its environment, and consequently refashioned her own conception of “Self” as transient, relative, and intersubjective. Indeed, Delaunay believed existing Western visual codes of linear perspective established models of space and time that could not articulate the dynamism and simultaneity of modern culture. Instead, she fashioned her autobiographical experiences through color, temporality, and rhythm. Delaunay's Robe Simultanée is a complex nexus, entwining her own biography, modern philosophies of color and reality, the relocation of the body as the site of knowledge and meaning, and the sensate, lived experience of Parisian modernity.