The Brooklyn Rail

“In [Sonia Delaunay’s] studio,” a 1927 advertising flyer promised, “you will know that you are seeing something new, something that… will transform your life into a work of art.” Delaunay’s Paris atelier in the twenties was producing textiles, carpets, garments, movie sets, furniture, books, and paintings—everything a person might need for an artful existence and all made in the “simultaneous” (simultané) style that the artist developed with her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay. Simultané married the color theory investigations of artists such as Georges Seurat with the geometries of Cubism to explore surfaces and disrupt contours. In painting, the Delaunays’ forms expanded to include the circles and curves of modern life such as automobile tires and the swooping legs of the Eiffel Tower. Their graceful arcs and symphonic colors prompted the poet Guillaume Apollinaire to call their work “Orphism” after the mythological musician Orpheus, who soothed wild beasts (in French, fauve) with his melodies. Such harmonies continued through to Sonia Delaunay’s applied art and design work, and as this wonderfully comprehensive exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center (BGC) Gallery demonstrates, in those media she pushed her experiments even further.

That we should not limit our understanding of Delaunay’s career to her paintings on canvas—that we should recognize that she herself transformed the stuff of her everyday life into a work of art—is the insight of curators Waleria Dorogova and Laura Microulis, who have assembled important loans, including significant archival material from the gift Sonia Delaunay and her son Paul made to the French state, to demonstrate her research and play in multiple media. From the first, this was apparent to Delaunay, too, who realized that a patchwork crib cover she made for her son in 1911 resembled both the quilts of her Ukrainian heritage as well as Cubist paintings. The BGC makes it clear, as well, by foregrounding in the first gallery a Robe Simultanée (1913) also made by Delaunay from pieces of fabric. These remarkable survivals—the quilt and dress were used and considered art—demonstrate Delaunay’s commitment to living her art. The dress, constructed according to color theory rather than from dressmaking principles, has the lumpen misshapenness of a garment well worn, with crinkles of silk stitched next to patches of furry fabric. A photograph of Delaunay in the dress places her in her era and establishes her as kin to contemporaries who used their dress to help reinforce their artistic identities, such as Vanessa Bell, Aleksandra Ekster, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe. At the same time—and here we see temporal simultaneity in action—I was reminded of Emily Bode’s current clothing collections and the patchwork jackets she constructs from vintage fabrics, some pulled from the same period as Delaunay’s dress.

Living Art is full of such evocative inclusions. A gallery devoted to Delaunay’s work with costume and sets for the stage and film corresponds with their time spent in Spain and Portugal waiting out World War I before returning to France (this decision was controversial, with Robert considered a deserter until he was declared physically unfit for combat). It showcases her collaborations with Robert—he designed stage backdrops, and she costumes—as well as with creators as diverse as Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev and Dada poets like Tristan Tzara and Vera Sudeikin with and for whom she designed garments with lines of poetry embroidered onto the sleeves (her Robes-Poèmes of 1922). Most fascinating to me in this gallery were her costumes for the film Le P’tit Parigot (1926), directed by René le Somptier. Here, startlingly, we see her creating in black-and- white rather than the luminous colors for which she was so known. The film is represented by a brief clip showing couples dancing in a ballroom, and it is mesmerizing. Delaunay’s strong contrasts between black and white and the shapes applied to the textiles break up the torsos wearing them, drawing attention to heads and limbs. I found myself thinking of the purpose of the dazzle paint applied to World War I warships: not to disappear but to dissemble.

Other vitrines provide examples of the artist’s prowess as a businesswoman, housing examples of her textile designs, the color cards on which she specified what we’d now call the “colorways” available for each design, the blocks to print them, and swatches of the fabrics—what she called tissus simultanés—that went into production. And in her old age (she died in 1979 at ninety-seven), she inhabited the status of a grande dame, embracing opportunities to promote her work as diverse as a 1964 retrospective at the Louvre (the first for a living female artist) and decorating a 1967 Matra roadster (represented here by a scale model). A 1967 notebook finds Delaunay continuing to experiment with color: “first yellow in years…” one page reads.

If Sonia Delaunay lived a life of art, then it’s important to see her as that life’s creator as well as its spokesmodel. Indeed, she created with women in mind. The 1927 advertisement for Delaunay’s studio begins its copy with “woman… friend!”, and a fashion plate for a robe simultanée that appears several times in the exhibition seems to portray that friend. She stands in front of a folding screen and sways at the waist so that she bends vertically and the screen folds horizontally; each sports a different simultaneous design. The Delaunay collector/client is one in action, either through the busy-ness of her fabrics’ patterning or through the literal movement of her clothes (a 1919 costume design for the dancer Gaby was constructed of black-and-white ovals that overlapped each other as she moved), and she is insistently modern. In a 1968 video in the final gallery, Françoise Hardy sings “Comment te dire adieu” while wearing a Dior dress based on a 1923 Delaunay design. Hardy walks between panels depicting abstract Delaunay images, at the end of the song taking her position as another fashion plate in a lineup of Delaunay’s dress designs, transforming her life into a work of art.