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| Yellow Nude (1908) |
This spring has seen the Tate Modern open the first ever UK
retrospective of Sonia Delaunay – and it makes for a fascinating and educative
experience.
Delaunay (1885-1979) was one of the pioneers of abstract
painting and a key figure in the Paris avant-garde, particularly in the early
20th century, and this exhibition gives us the chance to explore the
breadth of her work.
Born in Odessa, at the age of five she went to live with a
wealthy uncle in St Petersburg, before studying art in Germany and then moving
to Paris in 1906 – a year after the sensation-causing, game-changing Fauve
exhibition.
Shortly thereafter, with her somewhat disapproving parents
wanting her to return to Russia, Delaunay married gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde –
probably a marriage of convenience in order to facilitate her stay in the
French capital, given that he was gay.
It worked for both of them: Delaunay gained access to the art
world through Uhde and he was able to wear heterosexual married respectability.
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| Portrait of Philomème, 1907 |
Sonia met Robert Delaunay via the gallery in 1909. Divorce from
Uhde was finalised the following year and she and Robert were married in the
November, with a son, Charles, born early in 1911.
But so much for the background – now for the work.
Early paintings show the influence of both the Fauves and the
likes of Gauguin – in particular, the superb Yellow Nude (1908),
which echoes both the cloisonnism and colour of the
former’s Yellow Christ and the latter’s use of other colours.
And we can see the same influences in other works, including
several portraits of her dressmaker, Philomène, and a series of paintings of
young Finnish women.
So if you’re not familiar at all with Delaunay’s work – or only
through the later abstracts – then it’s a great way to gain an understanding of
just how good she was. (God, she was better than Derain).
But from the earliest days of her career, she was also working
in non-traditional art forms, and we get a taste of this in the second room:
embroidery, for instance, an abstractly-painted toy box and a patchwork cradle
cover the for the young Charles.
Indeed, Delaunay thought that, after creating it, the cradle
cover ‘evoked Cubist conceptions’.
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| Coat – possibly for Gloria Swanson |
For many critics, this is the period that the Delaunays – whose
partnership occurred in art as in the bed – create what legendary poet,
novelist and critic Guillaume Apollinaire christened in 1913 as Orphism, the
couple’s own version of Cubism.
It’s one thing, though, to decorate your own home, but entirely
another to take such techniques into the public realm.
Visiting Spain when WWI broke out, the couple decided to stay in
the country. But in 1917, as the Russian Revolution saw financial support from
her family dry up, Sonia took those techniques and started to make money from
them.
Showing great business nous, she started her own company, Casa
Sonia, selling her designs for fashion and interior décor. She also decorated a
casino, designed costumes for Diaghilev for the ballet Cleopatra and also
for opera.
This is a real case of the ‘applied arts’, and remains an
illustration of just how blurred the lines are between the ‘fine arts’ and any
other form of art.
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| Prismes electriques, 1914 |
It continues: next year, for instance, sculptor Anish Kapoor is
set to design a new production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at the
English National Opera, which is part of the selling point of that production.
This was also pretty new terrain for me: there’s a reason I’ve
hardly ever been inside the V&A – I’m not particularly interested in
fashion, textiles and so forth.
But one of this exhibition’s really big pluses is in showing
just how blurred those lines are, and keeping the likes of me interested in the
applications of Delaunay’s art.
There are fashion drawings, rolls and swatches of fabric, and
finished garments – including an extraordinary coat that is rumoured to have
been made for Hollywood star Gloria Swanson: even a bookshelf designed for
student accomodation.
This is not art as elitism.
There are also obvious points at which a venn diagram of this
exhibition and one of last year’s wonderful Matisse cut-outs would overlap –
and that’s excluding the Fauvist influence that I mentioned earlier.
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| Propeller, 1937 |
Like Matisse, Delaunay worked to link text and image – not least
in illustrating Blaise Cendrars’s poem, La prose du Transsibérien et de la
Petite Jehanne de France. The exhibits also include paintings
of dresses designed with brief poems on them.
In Matisse’s case. A limited number of designs were incorporated
into fabrics such as scarves.
After the war she and Robert returned to Paris and, in 1937, she
produced three vast canvases for the International Exhibition of Arts and
Technology – murals of an aeroplane propeller, an engine and a dashboard.
All of them are exhibited at the Tate Modern: all of them still
feel incredibly modern, not least because of their graphic – and indeed, deeply
technical – approach to their subjects.
Robert died of cancer in 1941, and Sonia dedicated much energy
to looking after his legacy.
Yet there is plenty of work here from after that period too. As
The Other Half noted in the final room, containing works produced in her
eighties, staying active; keeping busy – it makes a difference.
There is plenty here to enjoy and to be educated by.
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| Bal Bullier (1912-13) |
As I’ve already noted, she took her art into a variety of
applied directions – initially motivated by the need for an income – but the
use of designs for clothing, interiors etc can be argued to increase access to
art and design.
The exhibition includes many examples of her abstracts – it is
intriguing to see how she developed recurring abstract themes over the decades,
changing media and palette – while some works, such as Bal Bullier
(1912-13), illustrate her breaking down of the barriers between the purely
abstract and the purely figurative.
Many of the works have a great sense of rhythm and movement.
All in all, a fascinating exhibition and one that’s well worth
visiting: there’s little that is static here.
I was previously only really familiar with Delaunay from our
visit to the Pompidou last July, but this allowed me to appreciate an extremely
fine artist very much better.
I heartily recommend that you take the same opportunity.
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