Sonia Delaunay: Simultaneity

to her, “Many of these women who go abroad, … that’s their dream to have a Delaunay dress or coat. . . . Delaunay clothes are something only a few people can afford.” Indeed, Sonia’s business was the main source of income for the Delaunay couple throughout the 1920s, until the 1929 stock-market crash put an end to it. Although she continued producing and selling textile designs, Delaunay closed her fashion workshop and devoted more time to making art. Overshadowed, however, by her husband’s reputation, she struggled to be recognized as an artist. American collectors, such as John Quinn and Albert Eugene Gallatin, who began collecting Robert’s works in the 1920s, didn’t seem to be aware—or chose to ignore—that Sonia painted too. Despite her pioneering role in the Orphism movement and the beginnings of abstraction in Paris in the early 1910s, Sonia had not been invited to participate in the 1913 Armory Show, where Robert had three paintings, nor was she included in MoMA’s 1936 landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art , in which Robert was represented with six works. In Sonia Delaunay’s archives (now at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou) the files of her correspondence with American museums document primarily the curators’ efforts at acquiring paintings by Robert, especially after his death in 1941. When American dealers first contacted Sonia after the war, they were motivated by the desire to have access to Robert’s works, for which there was increasing demand. Sonia’s work was first shown in New York in Sidney Janis’s 1949 exhibition Artists: Man and Wife, which featured several artist couples. Around the same time, the dealer Rose Fried contacted Sonia expressing

Dress Design, 1923 (cat. no. 9)