How Sonia Delaunay paved the way for wearable art as we know it

Sonia Delaunay once remarked that her art had appeared ‘40 years too early.’ Even today, time has yet to catch up with the Ukrainian-born French artist’s pioneering vision and astounding output, which spanned the turn of the century through the 1970s. The boldness of her colourful geometric compositions was rivalled only by her insatiable appetite to explore nearly every creative discipline, from painting, mosaics and book design to costume, jewellery and furniture.

With a penchant for marketing and savvy entrepreneurship, Delaunay cemented her legacy in modern art, as well as that of her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay. And yet, almost 45 years after her death in 1979, Sonia Delaunay’s work remains ripe for rediscovery.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, a new exhibition at Bard Graduate Center in New York, spotlights the artist’s boundless creativity and business ingenuity. Open through 7 July, the show presents some 200 objects from Delaunay’s wide-ranging output, many of which have never been exhibited until now. They range from the ‘precious’ to the ‘ordinary’, describes the Center’s research curator Laura Microulis, who co-curated the exhibition. Across all of Delaunay’s creations is ‘the evidence of her hand’, says Microulis, adding that ‘Sonia enjoyed a sense of spontaneity in her work.’

After studying in Karlsruhe, Germany, and moving to Paris in 1905, Sonia met Robert Delaunay whom she married in 1910. Inspired by Michel Eugène Chevreul’s colour theories, the couple developed their signature style, Simultanism. Fusing Cubism’s geometrics and Fauvism’s saturated palette, Simultanism prized the dynamic optical effect of juxtaposing planes of contrasting colours. In 1913, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire began calling this kaleidoscopic aesthetic ‘Orphism.’

‘Sonia has always said that she was looking for a rhythm in her designs. The patterns are not geometry; they’re rhythm,’ explains Waleria Dorogova, an independent art historian and the co-curator of Living Art.

While the Delaunays initially pursued Simultanism through abstract painting, a medium they’d continue with throughout their lives, Sonia soon began experimenting with three-dimensional forms. As the now-famous story has it, in 1911 she made a patchwork blanket for her newborn son, Charles, influenced by quilts she’d seen in the homes of Ukrainian peasants. ‘She was drawn to textile as a medium’, particularly its textural and light-reflecting qualities, says Dorogova.

The curator notes the originality of Delaunay’s earliest garments, such as the 1913 Simultaneous Dress and Simultaneous Vest, which she made for herself and Robert, respectively. ‘These are just as important as Sonia’s 1914 painting Electric Prisms or her monumental panels for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris,’ says Dorogova of the patchwork pieces. ‘These garments have nothing to do with the fashion of the time — they’re based on principles of painting. There is something really magical about them because they look like nothing else in the world.’

Sonia wore the Simultaneous Dress, one of the first objects visitors encounter in Living Art, as a means of self-promotion at artist gatherings. She believed so significantly in the garment’s power to convey her creative prowess that she had two sets of photographs taken of herself donning the design. ‘She wanted to draw attention to the fact that she was experimenting with abstraction in a way that no one else was’, says Microulis.

Over the next decade Delaunay turned her budding interest in fashion design into a business. In 1923 J.B. Martin, a Lyon fabric house, commissioned her to design 50 patterns for printed silks and velvets. One year later she established a design studio in her Parisian living room, where skilled seamstresses and artisans helped construct her fashions of Haute Couture quality on a bespoke basis. She also produced furniture and interior decorations.

‘In reading her journals, we noticed Sonia made many statements about her desire to work with advertising and strategically influence how she and her husband’s artistic contributions were perceived’, says Dorogova. Delaunay was involved in every aspect of her business, whether overseeing fittings or personally scouting the right buttons to complete a look.

In 1925, Delaunay trademarked the term ‘Simultané’, bringing her artistic language and vision to the masses. That same year at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, she shared a temporary storefront called Boutique Simultané with the furrier Jacques Heim (a frequent collaborator) and the leather goods manufacturer Girau Gilbert. This led to international licensing deals for her art-inspired fabrics.

As her fame grew, Delaunay experimented with brand typography and iconography and emblazoned her own name on materials related to her designs. ‘She was a fantastic graphic designer in the modern understanding of the word because she had an eye for graphic reduction and editing colours down,’ says Dorogova, noting this became increasingly evident in her post-war work.

In addition to placements in Vogue and other coveted publications, Delaunay produced luxurious pochoir portfolios from distinctive fashion plates or photographs of models wearing her ensembles. She even commissioned films for her designs, such as one featured in the exhibition showing a model slowly turning a giant grey-scale wheel.

‘Beyond the fact that it’s a colour film, which is already phenomenal,’ Dorogova says of the 1926 clip, ‘it combines everything that Sonia knows as a painter with symbols of modernity like the wheel. It’s not only about the colour wheel but also the wheel as a symbol of invention and technology.’

As both an accomplished fine artist and fashion designer, Delaunay managed to achieve worldwide success while defying convention. ‘Even though her fashion business was a proper corporation, registered with the Chamber of Commerce, it did not have much to do with the Parisian fashion system,’ says Dorogova. Delaunay did not produce seasonal collections, for example, and didn’t participate in many industry events.

Her garments, too, bucked the norm and set new trends. ‘During the 1920s and 1930s, dresses had a very flat construction, which may explain why Sonia’s dress designs look so incredibly organic with her compositions on them,’ says Dorogova, noting similar makers like the Russian artist and fellow multihyphenate Natalia Goncharova, who designed dresses on a flat plane. When flat silhouettes with graphic patterns came back into fashion during the 1960s and 1970s, Delaunay experienced a revival, both via her own studio and other fashion houses she inspired, such as Dior and Perry Ellis.

While all of Delaunay’s fashion designs are remarkably consistent with her fine art iconography, Microulis argues the artist was at her freest when creating costumes for stage and screen — she had been doing so since the late 1910s: ‘The costume designs allowed her to experiment in a way that she couldn’t with the other fashion.’

Dorogova agrees: ‘She could bring her sketches to life, and the sketches were always where she saw the human body in a completely abstract way.’ In her costumes, which privileged the art above all, mobility was undoubtedly affected in favour of enormous ruffs and imposing angular silhouettes, some made of cardboard.

Delaunay’s designs, worn by a veritable who’s who of artists, poets and writers at charity balls and soirées, were just as fanciful and performative as her costumes. Living Art highlights Delaunay’s ‘poem-dresses’, embroidered with texts of written and spoken-word poetry.

Thanks to a new generation of labels like Loewe, Viktor&Rolf and Moschino, who often draw inspiration from the art world for their daring and dramatic collections, Delaunay’s sartorial legacy of high-impact, eccentric design and graphic patterns lives on — though virtually no fashion designers can also claim to be a groundbreaking painter, as she was. But regardless of career path, Microulis believes everyone can benefit from Delaunay’s tenacious and optimistic approach to life: ‘We could all take some notes from Sonia about pursuing a craft with such gusto and passion.’ Indeed, the ‘high priestess of colour art’, as Dorogova calls her, should be venerated not only for her singular eye but also for forging her own unique path to success.