Sonia Delauney at the Tate Modern, May 4th 2015

Sonia Delaunay at the Tate Modern May 4th 2015 

 Sonia Delaunay began her career in fine art then gravitated towards applied art but also changed from being a figurative artist to an abstract one. Her career in art is also synonymous with the 20th century, her handprint on its history unmistakable, looming and ominous.

 For a long time she was only known as Robert Delaunay’s wife but this changed from the 1950s onwards when her part in the European avante garde from the early 20th century onwards was finally acknowledged. Obviously Robert and Sonia Delaunay were an artistic partnership and the works she completed also seem part of her husband’s oeuvre as if the two formed a patent symbiosis. Sonia Stern (1885 – 1979) was born in Odessa before the Russian revolution. She was adopted by her wealthy uncle thus becoming Sonia Terk and this allowed her to travel to Karlsruhe in Germany and then to Paris in 1904 in order to study art. Her initial influences are cited as being the work of Paul Gaugin and German Expressionism which apparently allowed her to escape from everything academic and conventional. Her most striking early work is her Yellow nude from 1908 which although figurative utilizes the bold, black outlines and eclectic palette which aligns expressionism with primitivism and allows a vital energy and freedom of brush work that liberated her from the artistic conventions of the academy. Another significant early work is Young Finnish Woman from 1907 which also evokes the influence of the Die Brucke movement which originated in Dresden and Berlin and of Edvard Munch who was aligned with the movement in its early phase. At this stage it seems that she was gravitating towards the German school of painting but her time in Paris resulted in an apparent marriage of convenience to a gay German gallery owner, William Uhde, which ended when she met and married Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) in 1910. It is clear from this exhibition that Sonia Delaunay’s use of abstraction was an aesthetic choice because she demonstrates that she can articulate not only the realist techniques of the time but also expressionist and primitive extensions of this technique.

 By the time of WW1 a great sea change in art was occurring which was paralleled in politics and economics. The advent of photography in the nineteenth century had meant that all of the mundane artwork that constituted the bread and butter of the commercial artist, for instance catalogue illustration, had been replaced by the camera. The artist was thus released to pursue anything but photographic realism. The camera guaranteed the status quo stabilisation of the image but the image still needed to be interpreted. Indeed the next great shift in art was not to be the image itself but the viewer’s relation to the image. Robert and Sonia Delaunay became increasingly connected to a Parisian branch of Cubism which had been dubbed Orphism by the poet Gullaime Apollonaire in 1913. Another influence was the colour theory of Michel Eugene Cheveul whose key tenet was that colours are influenced by the other colours that surround them. This led to the Delaunay’s doctrine of simultaneisme which seems to be partly an attempt to bring art closer to everyday life and to dissolve the differences between different art forms. The first tangible production of Simultaneous design was the patchwork crib which she designed for her son Charles’s crib in 1911 which was based on Russian peasant design. In 1912 she illustrated Blaise Cendrars’ poem La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France). The poem itself is a stream of consciousness monologue counterpointed by images which resulted in critical yet hardly public acclaim. 

 The couple fortunately moved to Spain and Portugal just before the outbreak of war and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 Sonia’s funds were cut off completely by the new government. Therefore the couple began working for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. Sonia worked on costume design and Robert on stage design but eventually they felt they must return to Paris where they received a frosty reception. Apparently they were supposed to have stayed in Paris to enjoy victory or endure defeat but the Delaunay’s were keener on survival than heroism. While they were in Spain and Portugal Sonia’s works began to incorporate abstract design as in her Marché au Minho (The Market at Minho, 1916). The circles that summarise her abstract style are here integrated into her subject matter which is both figurative and abstract. The painting is joyful, immersed as it is in the amazing colour world that Sonia encountered. 

 After the war the Delaunay’s became involved with Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist movement which was then based in Zurich and also in fashion and clothes design, establishing her own business but also working for companies such as Metz & Co. Although Robert died in 1941 Sonia remained active as an artist until her death and witnessed her eventual incorporation into a truthful narrative of the European avante garde. Her painting departs from the figurative and the resultant design world she created is a notable imprint that had an international effect at the time (she designed a coat for Gloria Swanson, for instance). 

 The contrasting exhibition next door, Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden reveals interesting developments in Western art such as the abandonment of Abstraction paralleled by the defeat of the avante garde and progressive politics generally.  There’s a feeling of love, freedom and enjoyment in the work of Sonia Delaunay but also an innocence which contrasts with the dominant, morbid themes of grim political struggle, extremist violence and death which are synonymous with the works of Marlene Dumas. In the era of Sonia Delaunay ideology had been an apparent mask for the artist but later it seems to have become a rigid, unaccepting belief, as art and politics drew together. Marlene Dumas, for instance, would never have taken that train to Barcelona at the beginning of the First World War. 

 Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, May 2015