In my post i will be discussing the Delaunays and how they affected each other's art. Sonia Delaunay was Sonia Terk, she was born in poor conditions. Her uncle, who was rich, adopted her and sent her to art school in Paris (Guerrilla Girls, 60). This brings us back to how a good economic life helps women to move up the ladder of success in the art society. Then she got married to a Parisian art dealer, just for the sake of not having to go back home. Soon after she met Robert Delaunay, got divorced and married him (Guerrilla Girls 60).
Sonia and Robert Delunay not only shared love towards each other, but they also shared the same pasdion towards art. According to Chadwick, Robert pulled his wife towards a new direction of art "orphism" "Like her husband, Delaunay soon became firmly convinced that modernity could be best expressed through a dynamic interplay of color harmonies and dissonances which replicated the rhythms of modern urban life" (Chadwick, 260). Also not only he has an effect on her but she also had effect on him. "Sonia Delaunay’s passion for color had an effect on her husband, just as Robert’s influence on Sonia created a kind of shared Orphic rhythm between them. Delaunay’s Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon is presumably a study of universal energies, but it could also represent male/female interplay, with the sun traditionally being a masculine symbol while the moon is feminine" (Online 1).
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| Robert Delaunay, 1913. Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon |
Even though Robert Delaunay gets most of the credit, Guerrilla Girls have this to say "Together they developed a theory of color they named simultanism, but he got most of the credit for it. Guerrilla Girls shake a hairy finger at any dense-headed critic or art historian who doesn't mention both of them in the same breath (60). As would be predicted even though the woman worked on something just as hard as the man even more at some point, the man comes in and takes all the credit.
Due to the Russian Revolution Sonia's family lost all its wealth, which then led the Delaunay to work for a living in Madrid. "Her first opportunity came through Diaghilev, whose ballet sets and costumes were instrumental in combining visual art and theatrical design" (Chadwick, 269). This is when she created the costume for Cleopatra.
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| Sonia Delaunay, costume for Cleopatre with Chernichova in the title-role, 1918. |
Sonia had a lot of pride in her work, this led her to not act against the idea of her husband taking the lead in the credit for their combined work. "While his paintings never changed very much over the years, Sonia was always innovating, thinking of new ways their ideas could be applied to the world at large. Her work pushed the envelope between art and life" (Guerrilla Girls, 61).
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| Sonia Delaunay, Prisms isotiques, 1914 |
Works Cited
"Artists Georgia O'Keeffe and Sonia Delaunay." Suite101.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. <http://suite101.com/a/artists-georgia-okeeffe-and-sonia-delaunay-a100138>.
Chadwick, Whitney. "Chapter 9: Modernism, Abstraction, and the New Woman, 1910-25." Women, Art, and Society. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1990. 252-78. Print.
"Chapter 6: The 20th Century: Women of the "isms"" The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. 60-61. Print.
"THE COLLECTION." MoMA.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. <http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:1479>.
"THE COLLECTION." MoMA.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. <http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:1479>.
"Electric Prisms." - Sonia Delaunay. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. <http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/sonia-delaunay/electric-prisms-1>.
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