CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/9/2017

Fearless in all things: Sonia Delaunay

Born in 1885 to a modest Jewish family in Odessa, then raised by an uncle in St. Petersburg and educated in Karlsruhe, Germany, Sonia Delaunay settled into the high bohemia of Paris’s Latin Quarter in the early 1900s. Together with her husband, Robert, she developed Simultanism, an art that “could personify modern life, that could reflect the simultaneity of the world.” Never content to rest, she designed a ‘simultaneous’ dress, book-bindings, lamp shades, textiles, and so much more. “Colorful reminiscences of her Russian childhood, the artist’s first appliquéd creations testify to the quest for a total art, in the Wagnerian sense, from textiles to architecture, and illustrate her willingness to have the aesthetic of Simultanism penetrate the feminized field of popular culture.” Featured image is “Pyjamas/Dress” (1923/25).