
Installation view, Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910 – 1930 // November 8, 2024 – March 9, 2025, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York// Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Sonia Delaunay: A Force of Nature
In the summer of 2024 the exhibition “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan taught me about this pioneering woman’s major contribution to the development of abstract modern art. What I learned amazed me: Delaunay’s accomplishments, over five decades, were so highly acclaimed that in 1967 she was honored as the first woman in Paris to have a retrospective at the Louvre, where she exhibited her extensive oeuvre in the decorative arts.
How could Delaunay, in Paris in the early twentieth century when women weren’t taken seriously in the arts, have had such an impact—against all odds? And how could I—a practicing artist for decades and with degrees in art—not have known more about her until recently? Fortunately, Delaunay’s work has returned to New York in “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 9, 2025.
In mid-twentieth century, American pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein crossed a boundary by bringing commercial art—the everyday graphics of soup cans and comics—into the fold of the contemporary fine-art scene. But a similar boundary had been crossed before, albeit in the opposite direction. Sonia Delaunay, a fearless, passionate artist working earlier in the twentieth century, took art from her canvas and applied its color and non-representational forms to the material things around her, becoming an early influencer in putting the fine and decorative arts on an equal footing.
Born Sarah Stern in 1885 into a working-class Jewish family in Odessa, Russia, during a time of rampant antisemitism and pogroms, fate brought five-year-old Sarah a life-altering opportunity. It’s not clear exactly the circumstances, but we can surmise that to keep her safe as a Jewish child, she was sent to Saint Petersburg to live with her childless and very wealthy aunt and uncle, the Terks. Sarah Stern became Sonia Terk, and she grew up receiving a first-rate education in a family that collected art and traveled extensively throughout Europe. It’s easy to imagine that Sonia got to see first-hand the new artistic styles—like pointillism and impressionism—that were moving away from traditional figurative representations.
As a young adult, Sonia studied art in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then in Paris, the epicenter of the art scene. Her passion, talent, determination and ambition emerged as she moved toward becoming a leader of the avant-garde. At only 23, Sonia singularly gained acceptance into a man’s world with her first solo exhibit of modernist paintings at the gallery of the German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde. Soon she was exhibiting alongside Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Marc Chagall and other nonconformist artists of the day.

Installation view, Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910 – 1930 // November 8, 2024 – March 9, 2025, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Desperate to stay in Paris and to fend off the wishes of the Terks to come home, she agreed to marry Uhde as a cover for his homosexuality. A few years later she met the modernist painter Robert Delaunay, who coincidentally was born the same year as Sonia and had also been raised by an aunt and uncle from age five. They fell in love, Sonia divorced Uhde, and she remarried into a devoted, long-term relationship.
In what appears to have been an equal partnership, Sonia and Robert continued experimenting, creating avant-garde works based on new scientific color theories, art forms and philosophies. Artists engaged in Orphism, as their movement came to be called, connected with the idea of “simultaneity” – the color theory proposed by the work of M.E. Chevreul, a French chemist who first identified the fundamental law of the simultaneous contrast of colors. He detailed the effects that occur between two colors in proximity when the brain interprets what the eye sees. This knowledge influenced the Neo-impressionists to experiment with laying strokes or dots of color side by side as seen in the works of Seurat and Van Gogh. The Delaunays’ works of Orphism are characterized by their kaleidoscopic compositions using vibrant colors, abstracted, non-representational flat forms inspired by jazz’s dynamic rhythms and the beats of modern living.

By Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars – State of the Modern Art World, The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time, Coldcreation, 30 Nov. 2011, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49954250
For Sonia Delaunay this is just the first chapter of her story, in which of she turns everything around her into art.
Her art helped free color from form, and then she broke boundaries between the arts to apply her creativity to almost every material imaginable, from shower curtains to playing cards. In Delaunay’s own words, “I live color, I love it and I know it …I have lived my art, I have always changed everything around me.” A photo of her Parisian apartment shows rugs, curtains, lamps, couches and wall treatments all designed and created by her “freeing” of color.

Sonia Delaunay broke through boundaries separating the multiple realms of the visual arts by bringing creativity and synthesis to fashion, film, textiles, interiors, books, mosaics; even cars were not safe from her designs, and benefited from her talented hand, her critical eye and outsized marketing skills. Her 1913 notebook reveals commissions that seamlessly blend the spheres of interior design, fashion, poetry, and typography, containing entries such as “For Bonin: lampshade to make… buy felt hat to adorn… find out if they can print letters on.”
The 2024 New York Sonia Delaunay exhibition, on four floors of Bard’s turn-of-the-century townhouse, showcased 200 objects collected from around the world; they seemed right at home in their domestic setting. The show explored Delaunay’s prolific work through all periods of her career – from the early 1910s to the mod 1970s.
The Delaunays survived two world wars. During WWI, the couple left Paris for Spain and Portugal, where Sonia successfully continued her work in fashion design and the material arts. At the end of that war, they returned to Paris and what must have seemed like normalcy until the rise of Naziism. Contrary to some accounts, Delaunay continued to relate to secular Jewish culture and occasionally to speak Yiddish to Jewish friends throughout her life, but learned to keep this part of her life private. The Delaunays had a son, and Sonia was also concerned about his safety. We know from an article by Gail Levin, “Threading Jewish Identity: The Sara Stern in Sonia Delaunay,” that American art dealer and print publisher Alex Rosenberg (1919–2022), who first met Delaunay in the late 1960s, recalled his surprise when she started speaking to him in Yiddish. She requested that he bring her back from Israel a bottle of Judith Muller’s perfume Chutzpah. When he was asked why she used Yiddish, he explained that she did not want the maid to overhear and ask for a bottle too. The maid later explained to Rosenberg that Sonia had hired her 30 years earlier precisely because she was Jewish, but by now had forgotten this detail.
ln all of Sonia Delaunay’s many interviews she never once talked about her past. She remarked, “I had never been weak enough to let anyone suspect my real inner self. I was a force of nature, invulnerable, a little unreal, one who would smile at fate, never complaining and with an innate sense of happiness.” That happiness radiates in her gorgeous work.
Speaking of notable Jewish women artists, Barbara Taff adds: Marking the first solo showcase of her work in North America, Alexandra Exter: “The Stage is a World” at the Ukrainian Museum in NYC runs until January 19th, offering a comprehensive exploration of Exter’s pioneering career from 1913 to 1934. Museum hours Wed-Sun 12-6.
Barbara Taff is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist who brings a sense of timelessness to her photography sculptures, cartoons and visual designs. An award-winning graphic designer and educator, and early art director of Lilith magazine, Taff is also a cartoonist and author/illustrator of the children’s book The Best Colors.