Delaunay, Sonia

Sonia Delaunay née Terk took Robert Delaunay's name after marrying him. She is an important figure of the Paris School and one of the most renowned women in the history of art. Incidentally, she was the first woman to be exhibited in the Louvre. The two artists, figureheads of their generation, jumped on the bandwagon of abstraction and gave it their own direction by founding Orphism, a kind of geometric abstraction of light. Indeed, in the Delaunays' work, especially Sonia's, the prism of light is broken down into colored geometric masses on the canvas. Here an arc of a circle, there a triangle: all these shapes reveal the light refracted in rainbow colors.
 

Under the impression of this phenomenon, Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "Orphism" in reference to Orpheus, the mythical poet who beguiled even inert stones with his lyre. While the beginning of Sonia Delaunay's work is characterized by an expressive Fauvism with saturated colors, her encounter with Robert Delaunay will turn her into this so characteristic, geometric and yet decidedly lyrical abstraction.
 

The artist's graphic work is a response to her painterly research, exploring her key motifs and colors. The gradations are less present in her works than in his painting, the colors are purer and enhance the impact of her compositions. Etchings, lithographs and other techniques enriched Sonia Delaunay's palette. Her work includes several portfolios and, in particular, a wonderful collaboration for a poem by Blaise Cendrars, which has earned a permanent place among the most beautiful illustrated books. To date, her graphic work has not been the subject of a catalogue raisonné. Sonia Delaunay has bequeathed her entire printmaking oeuvre to the enviable Centre Pompidou, where some amazing (very) large-scale paintings are also on view.