sonia delaunay

Sonia Delaunay is a key artist figure of the Avant-garde movement between the two World Wars of the Twenty Century, prolonging her artistic activities also to the Post War era. Alongside her husband, the French painter Robert Delaunay, and other artists, she was co-founder of the Orphism movement, a kind of non-orthodox kind of Cubism noted for stronger use of colors and movement to decompose the space of reality.

Ukrainian-born, she took French citizenship, and as a living female artist, she was the first to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964 and in 1975 to be named an officer of the French Legion of Honor. Far from being close to Picasso and Braque Cubist lesson, Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s own version of Cubism was of a completely new and original conception. In their Orphism that was inspired by a stronger sense of color, seen as a basic component of physical reality, this element joins with the movement, and the merging of the two can generate a new perception of reality, in which simultaneity has a pivotal role.

Sonia applied herself to the development of an abstract language that could easily be applied to craft, expressing a truly modern vision of a merging of all the fields of arts and design: based on the integration of furniture, fabrics, wall coverings, and clothing, forerunning her times, her practice found to the new abstract language territories of experimentation.