Sonia Delaunay At The Italian Institute Of Graphic Arts

"About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings." -(Paris,1911)
The "we" in question is artist Sonia Terk Delauanay (1885-1979) and her husband Robert Delauanay. Two years after that, their friend the

poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the "Orphism" for what the Delaunays were doing. As you can see, Sonia Delaunay's work is a form of geometric abstraction, sometimes called Cubist Simultaneity, in reference to contemporary theories of color and number and rhythm.
I first encountered Sonia Delaunay's work at a retrospective mounted by the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the year after Delaunay died. That show contained a full array of the media that Delaunay worked in from painting and graphic arts to textiles, fashion designs and even playing cards. Sonia Delaunay was the first woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Louvre in 1964.

The recently concluded exhibition of her work at Italy's National Institute of Graphic Arts in Rome is one more step away from the shadow of her expatriate circle in Paris. Marrying a fellow artist might seem a good idea from the point of view of mutual interests but, as is often the case, critics apply the "one per household" rule to artistic couples and the one is usually male.

The featured graphic works from the collection of the Marconi Foundation, Milan, have not been seen often in recent decades. Alternating experiments in primary and complementary colors and with geometric and curvilinear shapes invite the viewer to ponder the intricacies of visual perception with enjoyment.