Quick Facts
Original name:
Sofia Ilinitchna Terk
Born:
November 14, 1885, Gradizhsk, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]
Died:
December 5, 1979, Paris, France (aged 94)
Movement / Style:
Orphism
abstract art
Notable Family Members:
spouse Robert Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay (born November 14, 1885, Gradizhsk, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]—died December 5, 1979, Paris, France) was a Russian painter, illustrator, and textile designer who was a pioneer of abstract art in the years before World War I.

Delaunay grew up in St. Petersburg. She studied drawing in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in 1905 moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists. She married the artist Robert Delaunay in 1910, by which time she was painting in the style known as Orphism, which involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure colour. She extended Orphist principles to the design of fabrics, pottery decoration, stage sets, and other applied arts. Among her most important works were her Orphist illustrations for a poem by Blaise Cendrars entitled La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913; “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France”); the resulting volume was a landmark in modern book production.

During the 1920s Delaunay designed textiles and dresses, and her use of abstract colour harmonies had a strong influence on international fashion. She returned to painting in the 1930s, joining the Abstraction-Création association in 1931. She and Robert Delaunay became involved in public art projects, and they collaborated on vast murals for the Paris Exposition of 1937. After her husband’s death in 1941, Delaunay continued to work as a painter and designer, and she lived to see the mounting of retrospectives of her work by major museums from the 1950s onward. In 1964 she became the only woman to have had an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in her own lifetime.

"The Birth of Venus," tempera on canvas by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485; in the Uffizi, Florence.
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Orphism, in the visual arts, a trend in abstract art spearheaded by Robert Delaunay that derived from Cubism and gave priority to light and colour. The movement’s name was coined in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Apollinaire regarded the colourful Cubist-inspired paintings of Delaunay as initiating a new style that brought musical qualities to painting. He named this style Orphism in reference to Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, who was a popular symbol of the ideal, mystically inspired artist. Other painters working in this style included Robert’s wife Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, and Marcel Duchamp.

The correlation between colour and music was an idea that interested many artists at the time. Symbolist artists and writers saw analogies between musical tones and visual hues. The painter Wassily Kandinsky had begun to associate music with the abstract aspects of his art, and he discussed the connections in his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

Color pastels, colored chalk, colorful chalk. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society
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Orphist painters were interested in the geometric fragmentation of Cubism, but—unlike the Cubists, who removed almost all colour from their paintings, and rather like the Fauvists—they considered colour to be a powerful aesthetic element. One of the resources that inspired Robert Delaunay and Orphist experiments with integrating colour and Cubism was De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839; The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and Their Applications to the Arts) by the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. The Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat had employed those theories in figurative and landscape compositions during the 1880s, but the Orphist style applied them in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his painting Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks (1912–13), for example, Robert Delaunay painted superimposed circles of colour that have a sense of rhythm and movement that can be considered analogous to music harmony.

Kupka, a Czech who lived in Paris, was a strong proponent of Orphism. In 1912 he exhibited his abstract painting Disks of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colours) (1912). Kupka’s vibrating colour orchestrations on the canvas were intended to unite visual and musical ideas. His title refers both to music and to 17th-century physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who first understood the relationship of light to colour and the formation of a rainbow.

Orphist works were first exhibited at the Salon des Independants in 1913, but it was at the 1914 Salon that Orphism took centre stage. At that Salon Sonia Delaunay exhibited Prismes Électriques (1914), an abstract painting that exemplified Orphism with its blend of Cubist geometry, Fauvist bold colour, and Futurist expression of movement.

The Orphist canvases of the Delaunays and Kupka deeply impressed the artists August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, who visited the Delaunays’ Paris studio in 1912; that exposure had a decisive influence on their subsequent work. Orphism also influenced the development of Cubism in Germany.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Pat Bauer.
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