Sonia Delaunay Biography
Sonia Terk Delaunay (Hradyz'k, 14 November 1885 – Paris, 5 December 1979) was a Ukrainian painter. He initially studied in St. Petersburg and in 1903 took a drawing course in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1906 she moved to Paris, where she painted works inspired by Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and where, in 1910, she married the painter Robert Delaunay. Already oriented towards pure color painting, Sonia joined her husband in his research on color and the refraction of light, in which the dynamic effect is expressed only by the modulations of color and light which give the work a lyrical tone, arriving at the movement called Orphism (or Orphic Cubism; a term that derives from Orpheus, the mythical musician of Greek mythology). Sonia Terk tried to take Orphism beyond the confines of painting: starting from 1913 she created fabrics with simultaneous contrasts, abstract creations of paper and fabric and printing characters for books in simultaneous colours, that is, with different chromatic relationships and typographical characters and with the text printed vertically. Between the two wars, Sonia created the first abstract dresses and supported her husband in some large decorations for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937. However, Sonia's undisputed dominion remained the art of tapestry and fabric, which she profoundly renewed, replacing to the traditional decorations of geometric motifs of surprising chromatic intensity, typical of his painting. In 1927, to explain the meaning of his work (the "simultaines" fabrics and clothes), he wrote "L'Influences de la peinture sur le mode", in which he explained "that a color that seems uniform is formed by the combination of a myriad of different hues" is the breakdown of the hues into multiple elements, taken from the colors of the prism. From this concept came clothes made essentially of colours, to which the simplified cut and straight shapes offered perfectly flat fields to best express their potential for relationship and interference. After the Second World War he continued to exhibit his abstract art works in major exhibitions. Sonia Terk Delaunay died on December 5, 1979 in Paris.
