Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was born Sara Stern, the youngest of three children, to impoverished Jewish parents in Odesa, Ukraine. At five, she went to live with her mother's well-off brother, Henri Terk, and his wife in St. Petersburg, Russia. She received a good education, had access to great art collections, and traveled to Europe, spending summers in Finland. At sixteen, Delaunay's art teacher noticed her talent and encouraged her uncle and aunt to send her to Germany for further art training.

After two years in the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Delaunay moved to Paris to study at the Academie de la Palette. She married her friend Wilhelm Uhde, an art dealer, ensuring that her family wouldn't be able to force her to come home while also covering for Uhde's gay lifestyle. Uhde gave Delaunay her first personal show in 1908, featuring numerous portrait studies that demonstrated the early influence of Fauvists like Henri Matisse and introduced her to influential art and literary figures, including, in 1909, her future husband, Robert Delaunay.

Sonia married Robert on November 15, 1910, after amicably divorcing Uhde, and their son Charles was born in January 1911. The two were to become one of the art world's most important partnerships, co-founding Orphism, a variation of Cubist art composed of abstract forms of vibrant color. Soon enough Delaunay began to apply simultaneously contrasted colors not only to paintings, such as Bal Bullier (1912-13), but also to objects, such as cushions, boxes, and clothing. Her friendship with poet Blaise Cendrars, for example, led to the creation of a series of "poem-paintings," including La Prose du Transsibérienn et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913).

Delaunay traveled extensively throughout her life, and each location influenced her work. While in Madrid in 1917, she began to design costumes for a production of Cléopâtre, and continued to create ballet and theatrical designs for many years. She opened a design and fashion shop known as Casa Sonia. Between the years 1918 and 1935, Delaunay painted very little, devoting herself to parenting and trying to make a living to support Robert's artistic career. She opened a fashion shop featuring her designs in Paris in 1921, which quickly attracted glamorous customers such as Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson. Delaunay's fabric designs became so popular that she eventually started her own company with Jacques Herm in 1924 and began a relationship with the Holland-based department store Metz & Co. the following year that would last more than three decades. A growing interest in the Dada art movement led to a fashion collaboration with poet Tristan Tzara, creating "dress-poems" with designs featuring color combinations inspired by his words.

Delaunay returned to painting in 1937 when she and Robert were asked to decorate two buildings for the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. The murals she created for this commission were well received. After Robert's death in 1941, things became very difficult, and Delaunay survived by selling both her designs and Robert's paintings. Being of Jewish heritage, she was forced to move frequently during the war, worried that she would be arrested.

At the end of the war, in 1944, Delaunay returned to Paris, intent on assuring that Robert's artistic legacy received proper recognition. When she was confident that this goal had been met, she finally began to focus on her own art, concentrating primarily on painting with a series of gouaches in the 1950s called Rhythme coloré. The series explored the power of color and the inherent rhythm in their combination on the canvas.

In 1964 Delaunay met an author and poet Jacques Damase who would eventually become her partner, nurturing her career by arranging numerous gallery exhibitions as well as the 1967 retrospective of almost 200 works at France's Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne. Near the end of her life, Delaunay's work achieved acknowledgment in her own country and global attention. As a measure of goodwill, French President Pompidou even gifted U.S. President Richard Nixon her painting Rhythme-couleur No. 1633 (1969). Having made an impact on both the art and fashion worlds, it was fitting that she chose to be buried in a dress that Hubert de Givenchy had designed for her to wear while attending a reception for England's Queen Elizabeth.