We shall go up to the sun

This summer Tate Modern is hosting the first UK retrospective of the artist Sonia Delaunay.

Who better to give you an introduction than Cinthia Willaman (2010), a PhD candidate at Pembroke studying the work of Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert? Cinthia wrote about the Tate’s exhibition for The Cambridge Humanities Review and the following text is an abridged version of her review.

Sonia Delaunay’s art crossed the English Channel from Paris for the first time in 1918, dazzling audiences of Sergei Diaghilev’s Cléopâtre at the London Coliseum. Her avant-garde costumes transformed the Egyptian queen into a symbol of the New Woman – androgynous, assertive, and independent – just like Delaunay herself.

Nearly a century later, Tate Modern has opened its first retrospective of her work. Produced in collaboration with Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne, Tate Modern’s Sonia Delaunay has succeeded in representing the artist's diverse and complex lifetime of creativity.

Delaunay’s was a painter and an illustrator, a fashion designer and a textile artist – an innovator in every artistic sphere. Tate Modern’s exhibition revels in all of these refractions of Delaunay; like a celebration, each room leads the viewer through the challenges she faced in her work and life, revealing how her art adapted to these challenges, and how she deepened her very particular artistic vision over her life.

In the first section, the viewer encounters Delaunay’s emergence onto the Parisian avant-garde scene. She moved to Paris in 1906, one of the most revolutionary periods in modern art, and enrolled in Académie de La Palette, where she studied alongside friends who would become some of the leading women artists of their generation.

By the outbreak of the First World War, Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay, whom she married in 1910, were internationally renowned. Sonia’s work from this period is scarce, but the handful of extant pieces is well represented in the show. These include iconic examples of art’s move from Cubism to Non-Objectivity. The Delaunays of course were at the centre of this development in Paris, influencing Kandinsky’s Blaue Reiter, Russian Suprematism, and Constructivism, as well as later generations of ‘pure’ abstraction.

It is the next phase of Sonia’s career that is most thoroughly represented in the Tate exhibition. Having lost most of their income in the Russian Revolution and returning to Paris in 1921 to find an art world hostile to abstraction, the Delaunays were forced to re-invent themselves. As they were never ‘gallery’ artists and seemed to shun commercialism, Robert began to accept students and small commissions to make ends meet. But it was Sonia who became the principal breadwinner.

Having dabbled in interior design and fashion while in Portugal and Spain during the war, she now fully embraced textiles. The rooms exhibiting her ensuing fashion designs are playfully and whimsically organised, emphasising Sonia’s love of, and uncompromising approach to, textiles during this period.

The final section of the exhibition finds Sonia in her post-Robert period. Before his death from cancer in 1941, Robert was a consistent artistic companion and collaborator, and attention to their partnership is noticeably absent from the entire show. At times their art can be difficult to distinguish, so it seems a little remiss not to address the significance and implication of this or indeed of their collaborative artistic theories.

Before Robert Delaunay died, he attempted to gift some of his now iconic paintings to French national museums, but his offer was refused. Insulted, he urged the American A.E. Gallatin to join forces with them to found their own museum. Gallatin too declined. Following Robert’s death, Sonia began constant negotiations with Musée National d’Art Moderne to house a museum of non-objective art. The Tate exhibition omits this process, which formed an important part of her struggle to assert her and Robert’s contribution to pre-war avant-garde developments. Attention to this part of the Delaunays’ story would have illuminated their current standing in scholarship and the peripheral status of Sonia’s work until late in her life.

After campaigning for over twenty years, in 1964 Sonia finally came to a compromise. Instead of a stand-alone museum, Musée National d’Art Moderne accepted the ‘Donation Sonia et Charles Delaunay’. Ironically, while it appeared that Sonia had succeeded in her quest, by the time the donation was accepted most international modern art collections were already established and the official narratives that were published largely wrote the Delaunays out of the story of modern art.

The works that Sonia donated to the French nation comprise almost half of the works on view at the Tate, so it is really with this most recent exhibition that Sonia’s campaign for people to recognise her rightful place in the history of modern art is coming to fruition. It has taken more than fifty years but now, at long last, Sonia Delaunay’s work can ascend to the pedestal of the twentieth-century masters, or perhaps in her own terms, ‘go up to the sun’.

You can find more about Cinthia’s research on her departmental web page. You can also read the full version of her exhibition review by clicking here.

The Tate exhibition is open until Sunday 9th August.