Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay

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Published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Edited by Matilda McQuaid, Susan Brown. Text by Matilda McQuaid, Petra Timmer, Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti.

Painter, textile and stage designer and co-conspirator (with her husband Robert Delaunay) of the Orphist movement, Sonia Delaunay is a heroine of early modernist art and design. Known primarily as an abstract painter and colorist, Delaunay applied her talents and theories to all areas of visual expression, including graphics, interiors, theater and film, fashion and textiles. A characteristic of Delaunay’s work is a vivid sense of movement and rhythm through careful color combination. Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay focuses not only on her art but also her avant-garde fashion designs for her Atelier Simultané in Paris during the 1920s, as well as textiles she designed for the Metz & Co department store in Amsterdam in the 1930s. The book features essays by Delaunay experts Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti, Matilda McQuaid and Petra Timmer, accompanied by more than 300 paintings, drawings, designs, textiles, garments and photographs.
Born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern, in the Ukraine, Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was raised in St. Petersburg, in Russia. After a brief period of study in Germany, she moved to Paris in 1905, and began painting in the Fauve style of Matisse and Derain. In 1909 she met Robert Delaunay, and together they devised a brighter version of Cubism that their friend, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, termed Orphism. Also among their friends was the poet Blaise Cendrars, and one of Delaunay’s best-known works is her 1913 accordion-fold artist’s book collaboration with Cendrars, La prose du Transsibérien. In addition to her prolific 75-year painting career, she created brilliant textiles and fashion works for nearly three decades.

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