Sonia Delaunay’s “Innate Sense of Happiness”

In what appears to have been an equal partnership, artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay experimented, 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. For Sonia Delaunay this is just the first chapter of her story, in which 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 brought creativity and synthesis to 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. Gail Levin, in her article “Threading Jewish Identity: The Sara Stern in Sonia Delaunay,” reveals that American art dealer and publisher Alex Rosenberg, who first met Delaunay in the late 1960s, was surprised when she started speaking to him in Yiddish. She asked that he bring her back from Israel a bottle of Judith Muller’s Chutzpah perfume. 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.

Lilith Online, December 2024, read the full piece here.