The many talents of the Parisian avant-garde’s Renaissance woman

Sonia Delaunay: Art, Design, Fashion provides a unified vision of the modernist pioneer’s work in painting, theatrical sets, advertising, interiors, fashion and textiles. Published for a landmark exhibition at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and drawing on new scholarship that emphasizes the multidisciplinary character of her art, it reproduces pieces loaned from public institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée de la Mode de Paris and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, as well as from international private collections.

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; one of Delaunay’s best-known works is her 1913 accordion-fold artist’s book collaboration with Cendrars, Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In addition to her prolific 75-year painting career, she created brilliant textiles and fashion works for nearly three decades.