Maison Sonia Delaunay

How Sonia Delaunay expanded the colorful vocabulary of modernist abstraction into the realms of textiles and industrial design

This volume presents sketches and textile designs by the great Russian French modernist artist Sonia Delaunay alongside her paintings and interior and fashion designs. It demonstrates how she transferred her color philosophy of "Simultanism," which she developed in her painting, to the mediums and surfaces of modern life. Maison Sonia Delaunay also explores the international textile companies with whom she collaborated, and shows how she explored the relationship between art and industry, and the ways in which she used her many abilities to design a visionary modern life. The book includes the first scholarly essays on Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators.
Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) migrated to Paris in 1906 and became a key figure in the city's avant-garde scene. During these early years, her paintings underwent a formal shift influenced by the vivid colors of Fauvism. She soon met her husband, fellow artist Robert Delaunay, and the couple pioneered a fusion of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism that they termed Simultanism--abstract painting that uses color in a manner comparable to the use of sound and rhythm in music. In 1964, Delaunay became the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre.