See also:  [Feminism]
                  [Blaise Cendrars] (poet of the World)
                  [Art Talk, by Cindy Nemser]
                   
                  [Robert Delaunay () (aka, Mr. Sonia Delaunay)

Sonia Terk-Delaunay

From the superb text "Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics",
by our dear friend Jacques Damase, ISBN 0.8109.3204.0
(Singapore, 1991, Abrams Publishing), Pp.6-7.


BLOCKQUOTE

Sonia Delaunay's perenniallity has been demonstrated
for more than sixty years. As early as 1913 (she was
born in 1885) she invented pasted cutouts, a technique
which Matisse was to use towards the end of his life;
in gthagt period she influenced Paul Klee; forty years
before tghe American painters she was playing with 
stripes; in 1925 she was designing clothes which could
be worn today without appearing old-fashioned; she 
fore-saw the future trends in fashion and interior
decoration; beginning in 1912, she over-turned the laws
or rules of painting. Even today, she belongs to the
Avant-Garde and remains no less astonishing a 
phenomenon than she was in 1925, when Robert Delaunay 
wrote of her:

    She carries winin herself that warmth, that
    characteristic oriental mysticalness which, 
    far from being destroyed by contact with the
    West, is reborn and finds its constructive
    expression in contact, grows and develops
    a transformation in which the elements that
    constitute her art are transfused into a new 
    art, comprising both eastern and western 
    characteristics - formal and indivisible, 
    so to speak -- of which whe alone has 
    created the mould.

To begin with, Sonia Delaunay's art was one of the first 
expressions of abstract painting, and one that proved to
be most fruitful. It should not be forgotten that Sonia
rallied to abstract art as early as 1912: Her illustration
for La Prose du Transsiberién by friend Blaise Cendrars, 
is without doubt the first application of abstraction 
in decorative art, and her 'simultaneous contrasts' are
among the earliest examples of that aesthetic.

But if it is not un-important for the historian that her
works preceded those of Malevich or Mondrian, from the 
art-lover's point of view it is more significant that 
they [her works] offered abstract painting a formula of 
which, regretfully, it did not take advantage. As distant
from Kandinsky's theoretical
canvases as from Kupka's, many 'in-objective'
painting (as Sonia Delaunay herself called them) which she
made between 1912 and 1914 unite the rigour of simple
gemetric forms with an inner life and poetry which 
emanate from the richness of the colour, the musicality
of the rhythm, the vibrant breadth of the execution.
By bringing order and lyricism together, she proposes
a synthesis which abstract painters rejected much to 
their loss, prefering on the one hand an intellectual,
voluntaristic geometricism, or on the other [hand] an
expressionism in which the frutiful complexity of 
'electric prisms' was fragmented and impoverished.

It is time (Sonia Delaunay would have been 100 years old
in 1985) to recognise in her the most permanent artist 
of the twentieth century. Polychrome architect, painter
of the inner life and poet, poet nourished by immunity,
by humanity, stripped of all literature.. Let us admire
this lesson in freedom and life which she offers to all 
who have the eyes and the heart to perceive rhythms and
colours.

END BLOCKQUOTE

-- Do you get the idea that *i* love Sonia?  Maybe it's
time for us "modernists" to get up off our arses and take
A SECOND LOOK, yuh think?

And now for something completely different, a poet by a
certain "poet of the world". Take it away, Mr. C. ...

For Mme Delaunay

On the dress she has body.
The woman's body has as many bumps as my skull
Glorlious if you are incarnate
With Wit
THe tailors do a stupid job
Just like phenology
My eyes are kils weighing down the sensuality of women.
Everything that bujps progesses into depth
The stars penetrate the skyl
The colours disrobe the contrast.l
'On the dress she has body'.

Beneath the heather's arms
Shade half-moons and pistils
When the water flows into the back with its 
     blue-green shoulder-blads
And the double conch of the breasts passing
    beneaththe bridges of rainbows
Belly
Discs
Sun
And the perpendicular cries of the colours
    fall on to the thighs
Saint Michael' sword
There are hands stretching out
In the train there is the beast, all the eyes,
   all the fanfares, 
    all the customs of the Bal Bullier
And on the hip
The signature of the poet.

-- Blaise Cendrars, 1914

NEED:  Image of Sonia Delaunay in a
       'simultaneous dress' for the
       Bal Bullier, 1913.

Quotes


Important works


Chronology