96 vivid creations by leading avant-garde artist, reproduced directly from two rare portfolios. Revolutionary designs for textiles, women's fashions, theatrical costumes, sets, more.
Sonia Delaunay (1885 - 1979) is one of the most important female artists of the early twentieth century, whose contribution to the European avant-garde was fundamental. Russian-born, she moved to Paris in 1906 where she studied at the Academie de la Palette. Her early work was infl uenced by the bold Fauvist paintings of Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gogh among others. Shifting her interest to abstraction, she celebrated the modern world and urban life, exploring ideas of colour theory together with her husband Robert Delaunay. She also collaborated with artists and poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars with whom she created the acclaimed book Prose on the Transsiberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France. After spending time in Spain and Portugal during the First World War, Delaunay returned to Paris in the 1920s where she translated her experiments in painting into the realm of fashion. She collaborated with the Metz & Co textile department in Amsterdam and Liberty in London and also produced individual items of clothing under commission. Her interest in fashion expanded into theatre and cinema, for which she created costumes and designs for film sets. During the Second World War and soon after, she participated in the creation of the Salon des Realites Nouvelles (1939) and developed her interest in different media, creating mosaics, tapestries and lithographs. In the same period, her paintings and gouaches evoked a renewed interest in abstraction and colour, marking her seminal role in the development of postwar abstract and applied art.
The Russian-born artist Sonia Delaunay, who with her husband, Robert Delaunay, was a leading light of the Cubist splinter group Orphism, branched out after the First World War into a distinctive career of her own. Between 1920 and 1930, a decade full of activity and success, she produced some of the most striking and original fabric designs of modern times. She was the inventor of abstract design for fabrics, and her materials--brightly colored and filled with geometric patterns--were the rage among fashionable circles in the Art Deco era. Delaunay made imaginative waistcoats for Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Rene Crevel, and other Surrealist poets. She dressed Gloria Swanson and various French film stars, the unconventional socialite Nancy Cunard, and the wife of the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. She also designed interiors in collaboration with the Paris architect Mallet-Stevens and created costumes for the early films of Marcel L'Herbier. Her fabrics were sold by Liberty's in London and many of the most exclusive department stores in New York. Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars wrote about her fashion designs, and her decorative scarves are known to have had an influence on the work of Paul Klee. Jacques Damase, the French publisher and art historian, is intimately familiar with all of Delaunay's original designs and fabric samples. In many cases both the design and the sample still exist, and this is the first time most of them have been photographed. Damase has written an appreciation of Delaunay, and has also assembled a representative selection of writings by her contemporary admirers and critics. The result is a definitive record of this unusually talented artist's contribution to commercial design. These dazzling, exciting designs are artworks in themselves; the fact that they had a practical purpose makes them even more admirable.
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