NEW YORK, NY.- In celebration of 45 years in business, Jill Newhouse Gallery is presenting a show of 24 works on paper by Sonia Delaunay. Delaunay’s work has a critical place in the history of modern art, both for her innovative contributions to art and design, and for the unique ways in which she faced the challenges of being a female artist in the early twentieth century. Long overshadowed by the work of her husband Robert Delaunay, Sonia’s art has recently been rediscovered, with a much celebrated 2024 solo show at The Bard Graduate Center in New York, and in the Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition Orphism in Paris 1910-1930.

Fully illustrated digital catalogue with essay by Isabelle Dervaux available here.

Artistic Beginnings

Born in to a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1885, Delaunay emigrated to Paris by 1911. She took classes at the Académie de la Palette and quickly met painters Amédée Ozenfant and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, both innovators in crafting a response to Cubism. Soon after, Sonia met and married Robert Delaunay and they began what would become a long personal and artistic collaboration.

Sonia Delaunay herself traced the inspiration to work abstractly to a quilt she had sewn by hand for her baby son in 1911 (now in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris), an apt beginning for a female artist whose art would continue to be connected to textile design. Within the next ten years, Delaunay worked with poets and costume designers such as Blaise Cendrars and Tristan Tzara, and launched her long career producing an unusually broad variety of work in a vast array of media that included painting, work on paper, textile design, fashion sketches, and graphic design.


Rhythm in Color, 1970. Gouache, felt pen and pencil on paper, 11 ¼ x 9 inches. All the reproductions of works and photographs of Robert and Sonia Delaunay are authorised by Pracusa S.A. © Pracusa 20240531.


Orphism

Working alongside her husband Robert Delaunay in inventing an artistic movement called Orphism -so named by their friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire- Sonia Delaunay’s art provides a coda to Cubism, with its unique innovations in the use of color and its interplay that illustrates the dynamism of modern life. Equally significant, Sonia Delaunay’s work reduced the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts, exploring the creative power of collaboration and innovation, and starting an artistic trend that resonates in art today.

In her designs for textiles, particularly her colorful and vibrant fabric patterns, we recognize a radical break from aesthetic tradition that reflects the modernist sensibility of the rapidly changing world Delaunay lived in between and during the two World Wars.


Rhythm in Color, 1970. Gouache. Felt pen and pencil on paper, 11 ¼ x 9 inches. All the reproductions of works and photographs of Robert and Sonia Delaunay are authorised by Pracusa S.A. © Pracusa 20240531.


Delaunay’s work in fashion, both her own clothing designs and her collaborations with known fashion designers, places her then and now at the intersection of fine and decorative arts. Her success in environments that did not traditionally value women’s artistic achievements was groundbreaking. As a highly visible and respected figure in Parisian art circles, she defied the gender norms of her time and created a model for future generations of female artists.