Atelier Simultane

"Colors excited me.  I didn't attempt to analyze what I was doing.   These were things that came from inside me.   Thirty-one years ago this month, my mother took me to see Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo.  The exhibition had been planned with Delaunay's cooperation, but she died on December 5, 1979  in Paris, two months before the opening.    

- Sonia Delaunay quoted in Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Gallery: 1980.

It was in March of 1980 that my mother took me to see the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery. The museum owned a work by Sonia's husband, Robert Delaunay, though none by her.  His work seemed to me inferior to hers in a way that illustrates neatly the difference between. the two of them.  Where her work brims with energy and ideas, his sticks too closely to isms, whether Orphism, Simultanisme, or Cubism.

Like other artists we've looked at here,  Sonia Delaunay  read Michel-Eugene Chevreuil's influential treatise On the Laws of Simultaneous Color Contrasts.  The book became  a cross between a dictionary and a bible for avant-garde artists.   Delaunay's  ability to convey  movement and rhythm through color  contrasts owes something to Chevruel.  Her own  Compositions, Couleurs, Idees published in 1930 by Editions Charles Moreau, Paris is a embodiment of Cherveul's theories.

This originality is apparent even in her very early work, like the unexpected Portrait de Charles de Rochefort from 1908. The flattened facial contours set against a background of brightly colored and unstable patterns  manages to convey her subject's  strong personality through its embrace.

I wish I had an image of the large wool rug designed by  Delaunay that was displayed at the Albright-Knox on a raised platform in the main exhibition hall.  Built of marble and stone, the museum was intended for the Pan American International Exposition of 1901, but the Beaux-Arts building was  wasn't completed until four years later.  I saw Rodin's monumental Gates of Hell in the same space and it is a tribute to Delaunay that her works, though modest in size, filled that grand, cold space with  the expansive  dance-like rhythms  of simultanisme.

Atelier Simultane, Sonia Delaunay's studio/gallery/store,  opened in Paris  circa 1923, financed by the commission she  received from a manufacturer in Lyon for fifty textiles.   The clothes that she designed for herself served well as advertisements for her art.
Her  friends wanted them too, and  soon Atelier Simultane attracted  glamorous customers:  Nancy Cunard and Gloria Swanson, to name just two.   As a model of her own designs, Delaunay's  presence stood out even in a Parisian art scene that offered strong competition.  Delaunay’s textile and fashion designs prefigured a  trend that art critic Rosalind Krauss named “black deco”. 

The collaborative spirit of the moment resulted in projects, notably Tristan Tzara’s “poem dresses” fashioned from Blaise  Cendrar’s sensuous poem “On her dress she wears a body”, dedicated to Delaunay/

Her theatrical sense and  friendships with the Dada and Surrealist circles led her to design the 1923 production of Tristan Tzara's The Gas-Operated Heart.  The play, a parody of classical drama, was called by one critic called  "the greatest three-act hoax of the century."  The figure illustrated at left seems to resemble the American dancer Josephine Baker, but Baker wouldn't arrive in Paris for another two years but, apparently, the cake-walk preceded her.

At the same time, Delaunay turned her attention to cinema, designing sets and costumes for the 1926 serial Le Petit Parigot, directed by Rene Le Somptier, among others.   Her Boutique Simultane was a hit at the 1925 Exposition Internarionale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne.  Delaunay was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne. on fashion's influence on painting, at a time when the material arts were regarded as poor cousins.  With the advent of the Great Depression, Delaunay's business shrank and she was forced to close Atelier Simultane, a move that she later described as "liberating" her from business.

Sonia Terk was born in 1885 in the Ukraine into a privileged childhood of travel. art and museums.  She arrived in Paris in 1905 to study art but became dissatisfied with her teachers, finding more to interest her in the new Post-Impressionist painters, so wild they were dubbed 'Les Fauves' by their critics. Robert Delaunay, whom she married in 1910,  was her second husband.  A depression and two world wars brought dislocations and upheavals; Robert Delaunay died of cancer  in 1941. 

Atelier Simultane is the subject of a new  and overdue exhibition, now open   at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City: Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay.   The Atelier was only a small part of Sonia Delaunay's career, but it would be enough to secure the reputation of a lesser artist.

As her work is shown more, her influence on other artists becomes apparent, ranging from her contemporaries like Stanton Macdonald Wright (1890-1973)  and Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) to such younger  painters as Frank Stella (b. 1936) and Bridget Riley. (b. 1931) who  has said "The music of colour, that's what I want."   Kupka's Floral is so dynamic that if you look long enough you can feel its petals opening.

Images:

1. Sonia Delaunay - Joker from Playing Cards, revised 1979, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.
2. Sonia Delaunay - Femme, 1913, Samuel & Luella Mason Collection.
3. Sonia Delaunay - from Ses Peintures et ses Objets,ses Tussyes Silumtanes ses Modes, c.1922-1925, Librairie des Arts decoratifs, Paris.
4.  Sonia Delaunay - Portrait of Charles de Rochefort, 1908, estate of Sonia Delaunay.
5. Sonia Delaunay - Danseuse Espagnle, 1917, Estate of Sonia Delaunay, Paris. 
6.  Sonia Delainay - silk fabric samples, courtesy Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC.
7. Sonia Delaunay -sketch for The Gas-Operated Heart, 1923, Leonard Fox, Ltd., NYC.
8. Sonia Delaunay - Sailboats,  1930, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.
Unidentified photographer - Sonia Delaunay modeling her costumes and sets for Le Petit Parigot, 1926, Antoinette Blanchette Collection, courtesy Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, NYC> 9. Sonia Delaunay - Robe Poeme, undated, Museum of Modern art, NYC.
10. Stanton Macdonald Wright - The Prophet,  1955, Pompidou Center, Paris.
11. Sonia Delaunay - Composition Number 16 from Compositions, Coulerus, Idees, 1930, New York Public Library.
12. Frantisek Kupka - Floral, 1919, Pompidou Center, Paris.
13. Bridget Riley - Arrest, 1965, The British Council for the Arts.


You may also be interested in Sonia Delaunay at the Italian Institute of Graphic Arts, posted here July 9, 2009.