Le Cœur à gaz / The Gas Heart - Original Lithograph

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Sonia Delaunay
Le Cœur à gaz / The Gas Heart - Original Lithograph
1977

About the Item

Sonia Delaunay - Composition Original Lithograph Signed and Numbered HC IX/XXV 1977 Dimensions: 47 x 20.8 cm Sonia Delaunay was known for her vivid use of color and her bold, abstract patterns, breaking down traditional distinctions between the fine and applied arts as an artist, designer and printmaker. Born Sarah Stern on November 14, 1885 in Gradizhsk, Ukraine, she was adopted in 1890 by her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, a lawyer in St. Petersburg, where she grew up, exposed to music and art, and learning several foreign languages. In 1903, she moved to Germany to study drawing with Ludwig Schmidt-Reutler (1863–1909) at the Karlsruhe academy of fine arts; Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), composer-to-be, was among her classmates there. In 1905, she traveled to Paris where she attended art classes at the Académie de la Palette, learned printmaking from Rudolf Grossman (1889–1941), and met Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), André Dunoyer de Segonzac (1884–1974), and Jean-Louis Boussingault (1883–1943). Sonia spent much of her time at exhibitions and galleries in Paris, which showed works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, as well as Les Fauves, Henri Matisse and André Derain. She did, however, maintain contact with Germany, exhibiting at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, in 1913, 1920 and 1921. During her first year in Paris, Sonia met the German collector and art-dealer, Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), whom she married on December 5, 1908, and whose Montparnasse gallery, the Galerie Notre-Dame des Champs, showed her first solo exhibition. Through Uhde, Sonia encountered many painters, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Robert Delaunay (1885–1941). In 1910, Sonia divorced Uhde by mutual agreement, married Delaunay that same year, and gave birth to their son, Charles, in January 1911. Together Sonia and Robert Delaunay pursued the study of color, influenced by theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889). Sonia’s interest in simultaneous contrast, as evidenced in her early collages, book bindings, small painted boxes, cushions, waistcoats and lampshades, led to one of her first large-scale works, the painting of the Bal Bullier (1912–1913), a popular Parisian dance-hall. Sonia’s first “simultaneous dresses,” a mix of squares and triangles of taffeta, tulle, flannelette, moiré, and corded silk, date from this period. Friendship with the poet Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) resulted in Sonia’s colored-squares fabric binding for his poem Pâques à New York (1912), and her collaboration on an accordion-type book of Cendrars’ long 207 verse poem, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), whose unique format, a vertical scroll almost two meters long, is said to have been inspired by the Delaunays’ fascination with the Eiffel Tower. Other aspects of modern urban life that inspired Sonia’s work included electric street lights (Prismes électriques, 1914) and publicity, though the various studies that she did for projects for Chocolat, Zenith, and Le Rêve gas stoves all remained unrealized. When World War I was declared in 1914, Sonia Delaunay was in the Basque border town of Fuenterrabía with her husband, and they did not return to Paris until 1920. During this period, they traveled to Madrid and to the village of Vila do Condo in Portugal, and Valença da Minho, where she painted still-lifes and market scenes. While in Madrid, she had become interested in Flamenco singers, and continued to do versions of this subject in Portugal (Flamenco Singer, 1916). Sonia Delaunay claimed that living in the Iberian Peninsula had opened her eyes to the very origin of light. Settled in Madrid, she started to engage in interior decoration (Casa Sonia) in addition to designing clothes and costumes. In 1918, Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929) commissioned her to do the costumes for a Ballets Russes production of Cléopatre, which opened in London. The soprano Aga Lahovska persuaded Delaunay to design the costumes for a production of the opera Aida at the Liceo in Barcelona. Following the Aida, she was invited to decorate a new nightclub, the Petit Casino, scheduled to open in a remodeled theatre in Madrid. She virtually gave up painting between 1918 and 1935 when she lost the financial support of her relatives in St. Petersburg with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. When Sonia and Robert Delaunay returned to Paris in 1920, they took an apartment at 19 boulevard Malesherbes, which Sonia completely redecorated with furniture that she designed herself—most pieces now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The Delaunay home was open to members of Dada and Surrealist groups: Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), André Breton (1896–1982), Louis Aragon (1897–1982), René Crevel (1900–1935), etc. Delaunay’s friendship with Tzara lasted more than forty years: they launched the famous ‘poem-dresses’ (words and colors in ever new relationships through body movement), and in July 1923 Delaunay designed the costumes for Tzara’s play, Coeur à gaz, which was produced as part of an evening of experimental theatre, with music by Georges Auric (1899–1983), and Crevel in one of the parts. Delaunay’s involvement in fabrics began as early as 1923 with the more than fifty designs that she provided a silk manufacturer in Lyon. In 1924, she founded her own company with four directors, among them the prominent couturier and furrier, Jacques Heim (1899–1967). Her greatest success came in 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, for which she designed and decorated her Boutique Simultanée, run with the help of Heim. Sonia Delaunay was extraordinarily prolific up to the 1930 world Depression; her work became known in London at Liberty’s and in department stores in New York, not to mention her profitable collaboration with the Amsterdam department store of Metz & Co., begun in 1925. She was designing not only fabrics and fashion, but carpets and panels and handbags, and also costumes for two films: Vertige, directed by Marcel L’Herbier (1888–1979), and Le p’tit Parigot by René Le Somptier (both 1926). Her renown for her fabrics and clothing brought her an invitation to speak at the Sorbonne, January 27, 1927, on “The Influence of Painting on the Art of Clothing,” where she introduced the revolutionary idea of prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear). During the 1930s, Sonia Delaunay’s life was divided between fashion design, articles in magazines, interior decorating, and projects for window displays and posters. In 1937, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, backed by Léon Blum’s (1872–1950) Popular Front government, solicited the participation of the Delaunays in the decoration of two temporary exhibition buildings: the Pavillon des Chemins de Fer and the Palais de l’Air. Voyages lointains and Portugal, which Sonia painted for the railroad pavilion, were awarded a gold medal. The Delaunays were ardent promoters of abstract art: they became members of the Abstraction-Création group in 1931 and organized the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1939. After her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia continued her energetic support of abstract art, while reestablishing Robert’s reputation with a number of exhibitions of his work and bequests of his work and hers to public institutions. By the 1950s, Delaunay was beginning to exhibit her own work again, particularly in the gallery in Auteuil of Colette Allendy. In 1953 the Galerie Bing mounted a solo show, which brought her renewed attention, and she was also represented in exhibitions in Paris (Musée National d’Art Moderne and Galerie Suzanne Michel) and Rome. In 1955 the Rose Fried Gallery in New York gave her her first solo show in the United States. The following year she had exhibitions in Grenoble, Havana, Venice, Rome and Milan. In 1958 the Städtisches Kunsthaus in Bielefeld organized a large exhibition of her works, comprising some 260 pieces, and thereafter she participated regularly in exhibitions devoted to the work of the Moderns. In 1964 Delaunay became the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre, thanks to her donation of 117 works by herself and Robert (Donation Delaunay). In March 1965 she sent a gouache and an oil to Salon des femmes peintres, a show exclusive to women painters. And in July 1965 she began collaboration with Jacques Damase (b. 1931) on a book of poems and pochoirs, using documents in her possession from Robert’s collection of poems by his friends. It appeared under the title Rhythmes-Couleurs, with a preface by Michel Hoog. One of the first important exhibitions of Delaunay’s work, which took place in Paris in 1965 after her meeting Damase, was called ‘L’Expo 1925,’ at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, where an entire room was devoted to her fabric designs and dresses. In 1967, with Damase’s help, she enjoyed what may have been her greatest tribute, a full-scale retrospective of her work, consisting of almost two hundred pieces, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. By the time Sonia Delaunay died at home in Paris on December 5, 1979, she had received the Légion d’honneur and painted the poster for the International Women’s Year of UNESCO (both 1975), collaborated in costume designs for a production at the Comédie-Française (Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1978), and taken part in the Paris-Moscow Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (1979), to which she had donated her entire graphic work in 1976. Her recognition as an artist was such that President Georges Pompidou (1911–1974), on an official visit to the United States, brought one of Sonia Delaunay’s paintings as a gift from the French government.

Creator:
Sonia Delaunay (1885 - 1979, French)
Creation Year:
1977
Dimensions:
Height: 18.51 in (47 cm)Width: 8.19 in (20.8 cm)Depth: 0.04 in (1 mm)
Medium:
Lithograph
Movement & Style:
Abstract Geometric
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU16122868491

Shop All Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Pioneering 20th-century abstract artist Sonia Delaunay was known for ignoring the distinction between fine art and applied design. Her body of work encompassed not only paintings and prints but also book illustrations, women’s and men’s fashions, costumes for theater and dance, film sets, wallpaper, furniture and interior decor. More than an expression of her prolific talent, this varied output was her way of erasing the boundary between life and art.

Born Sara Elievna Stern in 1885 to a working-class Jewish family in Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), she was adopted as a child by a wealthy maternal uncle in St. Petersburg, who saw to her well-rounded education. There, she picked up the nickname Sonia.

At the age of 18, she left Russia for Germany to study painting, and in 1905, she landed in Paris, where she enrolled in art school. She soon dropped out but continued creating art, producing canvases strongly influenced by Fauvism. Following a brief marriage to gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde, she married fellow artist Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) in 1910. After the birth of her son, Charles, in 1911, she crafted a patchwork crib cover that she considered her first truly abstract piece.

No matter the medium, Delaunay’s passion was color. She and her husband were the main exponents of Orphism, a branch of Cubism defined by abstract compositions and bright shades. They saw their creations as experiments in Simultanéisme, or Simultanism, a color theory based on the work of scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), who studied the ways in which a given hue can look different depending on the ones around it.

The Delaunays noted that certain pairings seemed to generate a vibration in the eye of the beholder. They felt that this movement captured the dynamism of modern urban life. The couple generally expressed the ideas underpinning Simultanism in their work with flat, overlapping panes of color. In fact, Sonia’s cradle cover melded their tenets with the traditions of Russian-peasant patchwork (also a big Constructivist inspiration).

Seeking to integrate Simultanism into all aspects of life, she designed other abstractly patterned furnishings for their home, which had become a gathering place for the avant-garde, and she worked the designs into their clothes, too, which she and Robert would wear throughout the city and to dance halls — behavior that today would likely be described as performance. In addition to performance, Sonia’s work presaged many other avant-garde movements, such as kinetic art and Op art.

After the upheavals of World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution, Delaunay retooled herself and opened a business. Keeping her devotion to color juxtaposition front and center, she launched a fabric and fashion atelier where she created textiles, wearable pieces, interior decor and furniture, sometimes collaborating with cabinetmaker Adolphe Chanaux.

Clients who may have found an abstract painting intimidating or inaccessible could enjoy the bright pattern on a cloche-and-scarf set Delaunay created or the striped handbag she designed. In this way, she brought her art into their everyday lives. Her colorful abstract design on a textile or rug could very well have been applied to one of her canvases and hung on a wall or vice versa.

While many women artists of the period were herded away from the fine arts and toward crafts (think Anni Albers), Delaunay was able to do it all. And what’s also so appealing about her oeuvre, to contemporary eyes, is the sense that Delaunay pursued everything — be it painting or fashion or costuming or furniture or graphic design — with equal vigor, without making distinctions between mediums.

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