Exalted color: The art and fashion of Sonia Delaunay

“Now Sonia Delaunay is evoking a revolution in women’s wear with her fashion creations. Make no mistake about it: clothing too is a work of art!”
—Claire Goll, “Simultaneous Clothing,” Bilder Courier (Berlin, April 1924)[1]

Vibrant arcs and circles dominate this slipcover for an exhibition catalog. The cover was designed and handprinted by the Ukrainian-born artist Sonia Delaunay (also known as Sonia Delaunay-Terk)[2] for an exhibition of her work held in 1916 at the Nya Konstgalleriet in Stockholm. This remarkable image captures not only the color-saturated style that came to embody Delaunay’s oeuvre but also hints at the diverse range of work she produced—from paintings and ceramics to fashion and stage designs—throughout her lengthy career.

The left, or back, portion includes the artist’s name and home city of Paris[4] as well as the name and location of the gallery in Stockholm presenting the exhibition. Here again, though, she subtly displayed a human figure through her use of color and form. The areas of orange and green at the top make up the head and arms of a figure, with the concentric circles near the center forming the body, and the brown and gray stripes at the bottom forming legs. This act of transcribing the figure into geometric patterns of color was common within Delaunay’s artistic practice at the time. She and her husband, fellow painter Robert Delaunay, were fascinated with the color theory of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, particularly his ideas of simultaneous contrasts of color. These contrasting colors, when viewed together, created a sense of movement and harmonious unity that became key to the Delaunays’ works, developing into the style they referred to as Simultanism.

Color theory became essential to both artists, but Sonia sought to achieve “an extreme exaltation of color,”[5] working with a freer application than her husband. Both artists were painters, and as Robert gained renown for his works, Sonia supported his career while turning her attention to an entire range of other objects, including ceramics, bookbindings, and textiles. These were objects traditionally considered to be “minor” or “decorative” in relation to the so-called fine arts of painting and sculpture, but by the late 19th and early 20th century, many artists across Europe, including Sonia, made no distinction among these genres. Rather, she emphasized the significance of the intersections of art and modern life, applying her expressive color to all areas and incorporating art into the everyday.[6]

Like the Simultaneous Dress, the Stockholm exhibition catalog cover suggests the same sense of movement through the push and pull of the color contrasts, which Delaunay achieved through a technique known as pochoir, the French word for stencil. Using this method, she made 50 copies of the cover with brightly colored gouache that was applied by hand through the cut stencils. This application allowed for the final images to retain a vibrancy of color but also slight variations of tone and texture that could not be achieved through other types of color printing at the time. Pochoir had risen in popularity by the 1910s and 1920s, particularly among book illustrators and fashion designers.[11] Delaunay was one of its greatest proponents, frequently using this method to reproduce her fashion studies as well as other explorations of color and form.[12]

The cover also provides insight into Delaunay’s fashion designs. Her 1913 Simultaneous Dress included a matching hat made up of contrasting rings of colored fabrics. Visually, the hat that appears in the self-portrait reflects the actual hat that was part of her ensemble. It serves to identify her not only as a modern painter but also as a designer and a modern woman of fashion. While her textile and fashion designs were likely not included in the exhibition, the catalog itself included a photograph of her wearing two of her own dresses.[13] In the years following the exhibition, fashion continued to play an important role in Delaunay’s art and life. In 1917 she opened her first boutique, Casa Sonia in Madrid, catering to the significant avant-garde population that had taken refuge there during World War I. During this time, she also received commissions for theater costume designs, including for the famed Ballets Russes performance of Cleopatra.  Upon returning to France in 1920, she opened Maison Delaunay, modeled after the great haute couture fashion houses with which Paris was synonymous. Here she continued to design dresses and other clothing as well as printed fabrics and textiles, all decorated with her signature vibrantly colored geometric patterns.[14]

Delaunay’s Stockholm exhibition catalog cover represents a key moment in the development of her oeuvre. This period was a remarkably inventive and productive time for her, as she came into her own not only in terms of her experimentations with color but also her conquest of nearly all genres of art. This exhibition heralded her roles as painter, designer, illustrator, model, and modern woman, situating her at the forefront of the 20th-century avant-garde.

The cover is currently on view in Impressionism and Beyond, in the galleries for prints, drawings, and photographs.

Delaunay’s Stockholm exhibition catalog cover represents a key moment in the development of her oeuvre. This period was a remarkably inventive and productive time for her, as she came into her own not only in terms of her experimentations with color but also her conquest of nearly all genres of art. This exhibition heralded her roles as painter, designer, illustrator, model, and modern woman, situating her at the forefront of the 20th-century avant-garde.

The cover is currently on view in Impressionism and Beyond, in the galleries for prints, drawings, and photographs.