Delaunay

Sonia (1885-1979). French artist. A great creative personality, committed to both art and fashion, Sophie Stern (her real name) was born in Ukraine and spent her childhood in Saint Petersburg. From 1903 to 1095, she studied in Karlsruhe, right at the time of the flowering of German Expressionism, which would influence her greatly. In 1906, in Paris, she enrolled at the Académie de la Palette, and there she met Robert Delaunay, who she married in 1910. That same year, she began to apply her husband’s artistic research on Cubism to embroidery and fabrics. In 1911, she carried out her first abstract work on fabric, making a patchwork blanket for her newborn son Charles. Painting to her was an art that had to expand into the surrounding environment and it had to embrace living forms, according to a concept of the “totality of art” that is common to many avant-guard movements. She developed the idea of creating clothes and furnishings that create a unique whole with painting. In her Contrastes Simultanés of 1912, she created a simultaneous abstract language in which pure colors, without any chiaroscuro effect, generated new shapes and depths by means of contrast and opposition. The following year, she created her first simultaneous dress, which she herself wore for the Bal Bullier in Paris: the human body became the support for a traveling paradox, through a dialectic relationship between the abstract and bi-dimensional geometry of the drawing and the tri-dimensional mobile nature of the figure which transformed the drawing. With this point of view, she projected the shape of her clothes through experiments on very different randomly assembled materials such as heavy cloth, silk, tulle, wool, cotton, and fur. In 1914, Blaise Cendrars dedicated the short poem Sur la robe elle a un corps to her. This was when she visited and became friends with the main figures of the Dadaist and Surrealist avant-guard, including Tzara, Breton, and Mayakovsky. In 1917 and 1918, after several trips to Spain and Portugal, she designed the costumes for Diaghilev’s ballet Cleopatra. Her artistic activity intensified during the 1920s, always supported by her work as a costume maker. She worked with Iliazd on Danseuse au Disques and with Tristan Tzara on Le Coeur a Gaz, both from 1923 and characterized by colored, geometric costumes that seemed both sculpted and tailored in movement. At the Salon d’Automne in 1924, she opened a cinematic simultaneous presentation with fabrics displayed in a special glass case in the large salon of the Grand Palais. They were produced in a kinetic fashion using a device with vertical rollers patented by Robert Delaunay that allowed a simultaneous and infinite movement of the colored lengths of cloth. Her Boutique Simultanée, at Boulevard Malesherbes 19, dates to 1925, when she launched an avant-guard fashion that would influence all future textile production, abolishing any themes of naturalistic inspiration in favor of a chromatic and abstract architecture characterized by an easily perceivable rhythm. Again in 1925, she participated in the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in collaboration with the tailor Jacques Heim. They exhibited clothes and accessories as well as fabrics for both furnishings and clothing (manufactured by Bianchini-Férier) with strong, rhythmic tones. Her experiment in graphic design for the the auto industry, in that same year, was extraordinary. She designed the CitroÍn B12 model as if it were a printed fabric. In this period she opened boutiques in London and Rio de Janeiro, and, always in search of new means of expression, she set herself the task of making costumes for the films Le P’tit Parigot and Vertigo by Marcel L’Herbier. In 1927, in acknowledgment of her work, she was invited to the Sorbonne to talk about the influence of painting on the art of clothing, and she was well-received. Instead of speaking in terms of figurative decorativism, she took a decidedly rationalist and simplified approach to textile and fashion design, stimulating the creativity of many great names in international stylism such as Jean Patou and Elsa Schiaparelli, and even anticipating the graphics and colors of op art. Her fame increased during the 1930s, when her clients included Gloria Swanson as well as the wives and companions of intellectuals and designers such as Gropius, Breuer, and Mendelsohn. In 1941, after the death of her husband, she retired to Grasse, in Provence. She no longer worked, but did remain active as a painter. During the 1950s, there were several retrospectives dedicated to her, and in 1975 she received the Legion d’Honneur. After donating sketches and manuscripts to the National Library in Paris, she died in 1979.