Sonia Delaunay: Simultaneity

sold to collectors eventually found their way into institutions. Thus the important 1914 collage, Solar Prism , which entered the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2007 as a gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, had been bought in 1956 by Robert and Nanette Rothschild from Fried, who had featured it that year in an exhibition entitled International Collage , next to pieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters. “I am having a lot of success now,” Delaunay wrote to Fried in 1958, “but America doesn’t know it yet.” Throughout the 1950s, her reputation had been growing in Europe, culminating with her first museum retrospective, at Bielefeld, Germany, in 1958, and exhibitions at the Louvre in 1964 and Paris’s Mus e national d’art moderne in 1967. Delaunay had become the grande dame of French abstraction. In 1970, Pr sident Pompidou presented one of her paintings to President Nixon during a state visit. The event was barely noticed in the American press, but Delaunay did finally achieve recognition in the United States during the following decade. Feminism’s second wave may have played a role in it, but so did the popularity of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, brought vibrant patterns and craft techniques into avant-garde painting. Indeed a central theme in Delaunay’s reception in the U.S. was the hierarchy between fine and applied art. In the first English monograph about her, published in 1975, Arthur A. Cohen focused on her activity as a painter,

interest in representing Robert. Eventually, Fried started showing Sonia’s paintings as well and, in 1955, she organized Sonia’s first solo show in the U.S.—coinciding with a retrospective of Robert’s work at the Guggenheim Museum the same year. It is true that following Robert’s death Sonia chose to focus her attention on promoting his work and reputation, rather than advancing her own career. There is no doubt, however, that gender discrimination—especially in the case of a woman married to a well-known artist—contributed to her being marginalized. In October 1955, Rose Fried, writing to Sonia that she had a hard time selling her works, added: “Recently I had a talk with one of our top Museum directors who insisted that he would not acquire ‘women’ painters.” Fried managed nevertheless to place several of Sonia’s paintings in museum collections by convincing some of her clients to donate them. “I have had little—(almost none)—income from sales of your work,” she wrote to Sonia in 1956; “I have rather tried to get works into museums as gifts.” It is through her initiative that MoMA acquired the 1915 painting, Portuguese Market , as a gift of Theodore R. Racoosin, to whom Fried gave it for the museum. Fried also convinced Racoosin to purchase and donate the superb 1913 oil on canvas Electric Prisms to the Farnsworth Museum at Wellesley. “Just between us, Sonia, I practically gave this picture away to accompany a Klee and other works which my client was willing to purchase for presentation to a museum,” Fried wrote to Delaunay. Fried’s efforts also paid off later when works she