Sonia Delaunay: Simultaneity

was allowed to go to waste.” The exhibition nevertheless was a milestone in Delaunay’s reception and generated a demand for her works. The same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased an important group of five watercolors from the early 1920s. The debate shifted in the 21st century, when art historians reassessed the role of craft and design in the development of the avant-gardes, upending traditional hierarchies between high art and applied art. The multimedia practices of artists such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay were reconsidered as major forces in the evolution of abstraction. This was the central tenet of the last two New York museum exhibitions devoted to Delaunay. In 2011, the Cooper Hewitt’s Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay highlighted her textiles and fashion work from the 1920s through the 1940s, and in 2024, Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, foregrounded the role of fashion design in her artistic production, illuminating the influence of her textile and other decorative work on her paintings, rather than the other way around. In today’s art world, in which the boundaries between disciplines are more fluid than ever before, Delaunay’s creativity across media has acquired heightened relevance.

introducing her as a precursor to 1960s American artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. In fact, Cohen blamed Delaunay’s success in the fashion field for her lack of recognition as an artist: “The irony of this phase of her career,” he wrote about the 1920s, “is that while it brought her international attention and acclaim . . . and considerable financial success, it resulted in a narrow interpretation of her contribution as a painter, an interpretation that has not yet been wholly rectified.” A similar stance was adopted by the organizers of Delaunay’s first U.S. museum retrospective, which opened at the Albright Knox Art Gallery (today the Buffalo AKG Art Museum) in February 1980—two months after Sonia’s death—and travelled to six other venues in North America, including the Grey Art Gallery in New York. Next to paintings and works on paper, the exhibition included book illustrations, clothing, tapestries, fabric panels, and ceramic, but the catalogue downplayed Delaunay’s commercial ventures. Critics reviewing the exhibition took sides on the issue. Hilton Kramer of The New York Times acknowledged being “quite unmoved by the ceramics, the tapestries and the other commercial stuff.” Rather, he concluded, “It is in the paintings and the small pictorial studies on paper that we feel the real energy and drive of this exhibition.” By contrast, John Russell, reviewing the show at its New York venue for the same newspaper, praised Delaunay’s activities as a fashion and decoration designer: “One of the casualties of World War II and its aftermath was the potential for good of Sonia Delaunay as an all purpose designer. . . . Somewhere in the carnival of color on view at the Grey Art Gallery, a great human opportunity

Isabelle Dervaux New York, December 2024