Sonia Delaunay-Terk
(1885 - 1979) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Sonia Delaunay-Terk |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Gradizhsk, Ukraine |
| Nationality: |
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| Birth: |
1885 |
| Death: |
1979 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Abstraction |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
Color is what energizes the work of Sonia Delaunay-Terk, a woman with an instinctive feel for color combinations, which she realized not only in paintings, but also in fabric, clothing and interior decoration. For her, the boundary between art and crafts was a fluid one. Little is known about the first twenty years of her life other than that she was born Sarah Stern in the Ukrainian town of Gradizhsk and that, when still a small child, she was sent away to St Petersburg to be raised by a wealthy uncle, Henri Terk, and his wife, whose surname she adopted. In 1905, she traveled to Paris, where she enrolled at the progressive Academie de la Palette. After a short-lived marriage, she married the artist Robert Delaunay in 1910. As artists, the two of them inspired each other: the hot-tempered Robert with his greater interest in theory, and the optimistic Sonia with her spontaneous method of working. While he was busy producing his famous series of paintings of a fragmented Eiffel Tower, Sonia concerned herself with creating a home: her first abstract piece of art was a highly colorful coverlet that used scraps of material and was made for her son Charles. A short while later, she adopted equally powerful color contrasts in her paintings, too, creating spontaneous, free, rhythmical work that verged on abstraction.
'Simultaneity' was the name the Delaunays gave to the new kind of art they developed, painting characterized by the effects of simultaneous contrasts of color.
The artist juxtaposes pure, strong colors, such as red, blue, green and yellow, and thus achieves a lively interaction of three-dimensional and two dimensional effects Henceforth, discs and arcs practically became a trademark of her and her husband's art. She never made it a point of principle to abandon figurative art altogether, however, and often combined it with abstraction.
Like many other married women artists, Delaunay-Terk frequently subordinated her own work to that of her husband whom she regarded as the more important artist. As it was impossible to make a living from avant-garde painting alone, she also began to produce bookbindings, cushion covers, clothing and fabric. Her luxurious and uncompromisingly modern designs found enthusiastic buyers in the 1920s, and her fashion-house in Paris developed into a flourishing business with as many as thirty employees and branches in London and Rio de Janeiro. Demand for her work as a designer dwindled during the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, although her work as an artist then began to come into its own.
After her husband's death in 1941, Delaunay-Terk made it her main task to promote his reputation through exhibitions and publications. She herself resumed painting in the 1950s and produced numerous abstract compositions, often tempera on paper, using distinct planes of color and geometric forms. Sonia Deiaunay-Terk produced her last painting, a lively gouache of brilliant red, blue and green, in 1979 at the age of ninety-four. |
Samples of Work
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