Sonia Delaunay, Tate Modern ★★★★★

Culture Whisper says: ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭒

Below is our preview, which explains the background of the show. Click here to read our Sonia Delaunay Tate Modern review.

One of the best exhibitions of 2015 is the Tate Modern's retrospective of artist Sonia Delaunay who, together with her husband Robert Delaunay, established the Orphist movement which championed pure and abstract colour. Combining a technical understanding of colour theory and form with unrelenting ambition, Delaunay united painting, design and fashion. In this exhibition hosted by Tate Modern, London and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, we'll discover Delaunay in her first UK retrospective and assess the extent of her rich interdisciplinary legacy.

Who was Sonia Delaunay?

Born Sonia Terk in Odessa, in the Ukraine, Delaunay travelled to Paris to pursue her art education and studied at the celebrated Académie de la Palette under Jacques Émile-Blanche (her contemporaries included French painters Amédée Ozenfant and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and even Duncan Grant). It was here that Delaunay met her second husband Robert and embarked on a life-long artistic collaboration.

Sonia & Robert Delaunay

Together, the couple developed their theory of Simultaeism, a kind of flat, abstracted art of rhyming discs and lozenges of simultaneous and contrasting colours. We can expect a lot of this style of painting at the Tate Modern exhibition, including the riotous clouds of colour in Bal Bullier (1913) and the swirling coloured lights of the modern city in Electric Prisms (1914).

Why is the Sonia Delaunay art style special?

Delaunay was revelatory in the way she brought modern life out from the elitist confines of the canvas and placed it into the design world of textiles, tapestries and mosaics. She showed her first ‘simultaneous dress’ in 1913 and opened a Madrid boutique in 1918, from where her avant-garde creations really took off and attracted the attention of the Ballets Russes and Liberty of London.

Be prepared for a detailed look at the diverse iconography of the stitched, glued and painted creations of Sonia Delaunay this summer.