Inktober Day 7: Sonia Delaunay

By the time young Sonia Delaunay arrived in Paris from St. Petersburg in 1905 she was already obsessed with color and she would remain so for the rest of her life. Her brief study of classical art in Montparnasse only encouraged her to break the rules, and it was then that she made the leap to Fauvism.

Self Portrait, painted on the back of another of her portraits, Jeune finlandaise (Young Finnish Girl) by Sonia Delaunay, 1906. (image via)

In her early career before the completely abstract art and fashion design for which she is known, she was influenced by post-Impressionists like van Gogh, Rousseau and Gauguin and Fauvists like Matisse, Bonnard and Derain (then at the cutting edge of art). She was already using the intense and attractive color palette that would influence the rest of her career. 

She met a fellow Fauvist painter named Robert Delaunay in 1909 and married him in 1910. So similar were their styles that it's sometimes impossible to tell them apart. They collaborated frequently and chased the same avant-garde theories their entire lives. “Our love was united in art," wrote Sonia, "as other couples are united in faith, crime, alcohol, political ambition. The passion of painting was our main link."

 

Sleeping Girl, by Sonia Delaunay, 1907. (image via).

Left: Portrait of Charles de Rochefort, by Sonia Delaunay, 1908 (image via). Right: Portrait of Tchouiko, by Sonia Delaunay, 1908. Guache on paper, 55 x 46 cm. (image via).

Eventually she grew frustrated that the Fauvists did not go far enough; she considered the work of Matisse to be but a compromise to the tastes of the bourgeoisie. 

 

Yellow Nude by Sonia Delaunay, 1908. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes © Pracusa (image via). This was painted toward the end of Delaunay's Fauvist period as she was growing frustrated that Fauvism didn't go far enough. Robert Delaunay wrote in his journal, “Coming from the East [i.e. Russia] to the West, it carries within itself this warmth, this classic mysticism, and instead of becoming subsumed by the West it finds its constructive expression through this friction, which amplifies the very elements of the art into a new art. After lying dormant, color has re-emerged." [paraphrased by me from a very bad translation]. Prostitutes were a common subject for the Fauvists and Cubists, but Delaunay's subject doesn't seem to be trying to catch anyone's attention or to be in any way performative. She is definitely judging the viewer. One critic wrote that Delaunay's prostitute wasn't the subject of the male gaze like in the paintings of her male peers, in that she doesn't bother looking at the viewer and her elbow closes her off, giving her some agency. I disagree, to me it looks like Delaunay is clearly more interested in portraying the interplay of color over her body than in portraying the subject herself; it's almost like looking at a tiger in a zoo who is covered in beautiful stripes but who doens't care a whit about its stripes and is just waiting for you to leave.  

After the Delaunays had a son in 1911, Sonia made him a baby blanked from scraps of cloth as was Ukranian tradition. She'd been born in the Ukraine but had moved to St. Petersburg at age five when her wealthy aunt and uncle adopted her. When her avant-garde friends saw it they exclaimed, "but it is cubist!" It was her first venture into fabric arts, which would later define her career. She began experimenting with collage to create similar effects.  

Left: Simultaneous Solar Prism by Sonia Delaunay, 1914. Collage (image via). Right: Flamenco Dancer, by Sonia Delaunay, watercolor, 1916 (image via).

This is when Sonia and Robert together developed the most important concept of their careers: simultaneous art (or simultanéisme, as the Delaunays called it). 

Simultaneous color theory had been developed independently by Goethe (yes, the author of Faust) and a chemist named Chevreul in the 1830s. Chevreul showed that colored circles appeared more or less intense (even though they were the same color) depending on which colors were surrounding the circle. He'd been hired by a tapestry company (Gobelins, who a century later would produce tapestries by Delaunay) to investigate why their threads kept suddenly fading, and he found they weren't fading at all, but simply placed next to colors that made them appear duller. This concept is called "simultaneous contrast." 

Goethe, meanwhile, took Isaac Newton's explanations of color as a physical phenomenon (i.e. light refractions) and demonstrated that a major component of the way humans experience color is due to processing and interpretation of the human brain, not to any independent physical quality of the color itself. He also noticed simultaneous contrast and pointed out that it was perceptual, not physical. Goethe defined complimentary colors (opposites on the color wheel which, combined as light, make white; combined as paint they make dark brown). He noticed how, placed side by side, they seem to vibrate and each to appear more intense. This isn't due to the colors themselves but to the human perception. The retina becomes fatigued and the brain processes the fatigue as a visual sensation. Goethe, being a poet, investigated the universal emotions produced by colors and how that was both a product of the human brain and an important component of what it feels like to see as a human being. 

While all artists of course use color theory on some level, certain artists were especially interested. Among them was J.M.W. Turner, who focused on Goethe's emotional theories of color, as well as the use of small amounts of complementary colors to increase the sensation of luminosity. But it wasnt until the Impressionists that serious attention was turned to color theory. Monet capitalized on Goethe's characterizations of the gestalt qualities of certain colors as "warm" or "cool," allowing him and othe Impressionists to revolutionize the practice of shading by using blue instead of black, allowing the coolness to stand in for value. In most Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings you see contrasting color with warm yellows and oranges representing warm sunny light and cool blues and purples representing cool shadow, while the spaces between the brushstrokes reveal hints of complementary colors that make the main colors lively and complex. 

But why the sudden interest in a century-old theory? It was largely the invention of the camera and popularization of photography that drove it. The photograph could replicate realistic imagery as people saw it, which had formerly been the sole job of the artist. What, then, was the new job of the artist? To notice in what ways humans see that cameras don't-- that is, to work with the experience of seeing. The Pointillists explored the physical sensations of sight while other modernists explored the more emotional side of seeing. They payed attention to the effects of certain shapes, rhythms and colors on the subconscious and used them to create an experience that was more about seeing and feeling than about subject-matter. For the later modernists, the peculiar visual sensation of seeing a red circle intersected by a pattern, for instance, was itself an acceptable subject for a painting.

The Delaunays went a step further than simultaneous color theory and incorporated patterns which, placed side by side, set each other off and amounted to a visual reaction that was distinct from the sum of its parts. Sonia believed that "simultanéisme" could portray the essence of movement because it caused to eye to do something. This was a departure from artists like the Italian Futurists who tried to capture a sequence of movements in a single image. Delaunay was instead trying to create images that seemed to move visually, or that created the emotional sensation of movement. 

Apollinaire (the poet) coined the term Orphism to apply to the simultaneous paintings of Sonia and Robert. Orphism as a movement was short-lived but it introduced pure color into cubism and influenced the Italian Futurists and German Expressionists as well as Marc Chagall and Vassily Kandinsky. A Russian who visited the Delaunays in 1912 delivered a series of lectures on the simultaneous which spread the idea to St. petersburg. The Delaunays themselves would remain devoted to exploring the nuances of orphism and simultanéisme their entire lives. 

 

Le Bal Bullier, by Sonia Delaunay, 1912-13. Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 73 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Musée d’Art Moderne. (image via). The Bullier was a popular dance hall in Paris where the tango and foxtrot were introduced to the city. The Delaunays went every Thursday and made a splash dancing the tango while wearing each her simultaneous clothes. Many other avant-garde artists frequented Bullier and word began to spread about her fashion design. Their friend Apollinaire wrote a notice in the newspaper urging people to go on Thursdays to see them. This piece perfectly illustrates how Delaunay believed simultaneous color and broken rhythmic pattern could create a sensation of movement. The contrasting color blocks of the figures are set against color blocks in the background that are the same size and contrast, giving the eye no visual rest and pusing the eye to keep continuously moving (like a dancer, obviously).

 

Le Bal Bullier installed in a gallery (the Tate Modern in 2015, image via). I find it helpful to see what paintings look like in real life.

 

An abstract painting by Sonia Delaunay, c. 1920s, I'm guessing. (image via). I cannot find any information about this piece but I like it. Sort of a mix between the "orphism" abstract paintings and the fabric design sketches.

 

"Beauty refuses to submit to the constraint of meaning or description." -Sonia Delaunay

 

Left: Rythme Coloré (Colored Rhythm), by Sonia Delaunay, 1946. © L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623. Photo: © private collection (image via). Right: Prisms Eléctriques (Electric Prisms), 1914 Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (image via). Prisms Eléctriques was painted early in the Delaunay's investigations into Orphism, after Sonia and Robert were out walking one night and saw the newly installed electric street lamps on a boulevard in Paris. They went home and each tried to capture the ephemeral effects of the electric glow and the scattered shadows on the sidewalk. The piece on the left, Colored Rhythm, is a prettier riff on an important piece she did for a much later group exhibition in 1938 called Rhythm. Groups of circles are sliced and their halves are staggered, syncopated, along a central axis. Around that time Delaunay explored her growing interest in visual rhythm, its flow and break, as part of simultanéisme. Like many abstract artists including Kandinsky, Delaunay often spoke about her work in terms of music.

In addition to color and pattern Delaunay interpreted simultanéisme conceptually and combined different creative genres to create something new that was distinct from the sum of its parts. For instance she combined poetry and painting to create a simultaneous book about a train ride that was not an illustrated poem but a juxtaposition of color and text that was meant to work together visually to create a physical experience of reading that mimicked riding on a train. She also combined poetry with fashion, creating "dress poems" where the form of the dress was part of the poem's meaning. In her graphic design she placed individual colored letters inside blocks of other colors, changed their size and placement around the image, and used this simultaneous visual experience to influence the mood that the words created in the viewer. This is still an important basic concept in modern graphic design. 

Delaunay, while grasping the complexity of the theories and their critical implications, seemed to work intuitively, resulting in imagery that operates on simultaneous principles but is also fun and beautiful. "For me," she wrote, "the abstract and the sensual should come together. Breaking away from the descriptive line did not mean becoming sterile." About Robert, she wrote, "In [him] I found a poet. A poet who wrote not with words but with colours."

 

La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913, a collaborative book project by Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars (the pen name for Frédéric Louis Sauser) (image via). This looks like a pamphlet but it's a short book that unfolds accordion-style. It's a poem that recalls Cendrars's experience as a young boy riding on the Transsiberian Express with a French prostitute named Jeanne, watching the landscapes fly by while daydreaming about tropical places and ruminating about the Paris of his childhood that he was leaving behind. The text, instead of black, is printed in multi-colored stanzas that are meant to play off Delaunay's paintings. The paintings and color blocks, likewise, are meant to reflect the mood of each stanza. The long zig-zag binding and alternating placement of the stanzas on the right and left sides of the column were meant to mimic the train and its endless hypnotic movement, while Delaunay's continuous paintings along one edge are its "window."  It was considered a "simultaneous book," meaning that neither illustration nor poem stood alone but were two united visual media. They did a run of 50, with Delaunay using a stencil to hand-watercolor each book alike. All 50 books, if unfolded and placed end to end, would reach to the top of the Eiffel Tower (as their publicity promised). The book made a big impression on the avant-garde art world at the time; the physical experience of a painting/book that you interact with that morphs into something with such large, bright presence was an important contribution to artist books (a medium which has been a part of every art movement). The author, Blaise Cendrars, who considered himself a simultaneous poet, wrote in Der Sturm, "Literature is a part of life. It is not something 'special.' All of life is nothing but a poem, a movement… Here is what I wanted to say. I have a fever. And this is why I love the painting of the Delaunays, full of sun, of heat, of violence. Mme Delaunay has made such a beautiful book of colors that my poem is more saturated with light than is my life. That’s what makes me happy."

 

Delaunay's simultaneous costume designs for Tristan Tzara's play The Gas-Operated Heart, 1923 (image via). These costumes were directly copied and worn onstage by David Bowie on SNL in 1979 while singing The Man Who Sold The World. He wore the stiff "suit" on the left and his gangly arms poked out at the elbow and spun around in an absurd little dance. Tzara's original play was a Dadaist satire of conventional drama; it has three very short acts punctuated by songs and bizarre ballets. It's written using conventional dramatic elements that seem to have been chopped up in little pieces and rearranged so they make no sense, with dialogue made of odd bits of idioms and a vague sense of romantic love. The third act's script is just doodles of pierced hearts. Tzara considered his own play a "hoax" that only "industrialized imbiciles" could enjoy so long as they believed in the concept of "a man of genius," a notion that Tzara wanted to lampoon. According to historians the play was actually quite good as a Dadaist piece. Delaunay's boxy cardboard costumes limited the actor's movement and emphasized how two-dimenional the characters were (they were all named after body parts like Ear and Nose), helping the audience understand what Tzara was trying to say. However the 1923 production is most famous for the riot that broke out during its performance. What had happened was, the Dadaist movement was starting to split up. On one side were Tzara and a long list of famous avant-garde artists, musicians and writers (Erik Satie, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, and Hans Arp among them), who were completely committed to absurdist nihilism (Cocteau nicknamed them "Le Suicide-Club" because he didn't see that attitude leading anywhere but ultimately burning itself out). On the other side was the influential artist and critic André Breton and his fellow artists who supported Dada's lampooning of the art establishment and bourgeois conventions, but felt complete antagonistic nihilism was too far; they needed to believe in something (they would soon go on to formally establish the Surrealist movement for this reason). So Breton hosted a Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit (yes really) and Tzara showed up just to make fun of it. He wrote a manifesto of Dada against Breton's Dada and many artists signed; feelings were hurt and bridges were burned. The next year Tzara organized a Dada exhibition of art, plays, music and poetry readings featuring artists who'd signed his manifesto. It was a packed house, full of artists, rubber-neckers who wanted to see the drama unfold between rival factions, and adventurous normal people who just wanted to gawk at weird art. While The Gas Heart was in progress, Andre Breton and his artist buddies showed up and went berzerk. Apparently Breton had heard that Tzara had said something derogatory about Picasso and that set him off (Tzara had said similar things about other artists including Duchamp and no one had taken offense, including Duchamp). They stormed the stage and attacked the actors, who couldn't run away or fight back because of Delaunay's boxy costumes. Then they completely trashed the theater and ripped the seats out, and at that point the audience counter-attacked. Tzara called the police and the brawl moved into the streets (still just among the avant-garde artists). Several poets were injured. After the incident Delaunay, like Edna from The Incredibles, never designed in cardboard again. The Dada movement fizzled almost immediately thereafter. Tzara's faction had distilled Dada into complete and perfect nihilism, and once they'd done that, no one could see the point of continuing.

 

The Delaunays moved to sunny Portugul in 1915 and lived on an allowance from Sonia's aunt and the rental income from some real estate in St. Petersburg, but the Russian Revolution of 1917 suddenly ruined the Terk family financially. Sonia, who had always been interested in the commercial and applied arts, turned her attention more seriously to income-generating creative endeavors. 

They moved to Madrid because Sonia felt they could earn a better living there commercially. She organized an interior design and simultaneous jewelry boutique called Casa Sonia in Madrid, but it never actually opened officially. Still, it won her valuable contacts in high society and she was hired to design interiors around the Madrid.

While in Madrid the Delaunays became close friends with the director of the Ballets Russes and were hired to design sets (Robert) and costumes (Sonia) for their productions, and later other ballets, plays and operas.

One of several costumes designed by Delaunay for the the 1918 London revival of the Ballets Russes's Cleopatra, 1909. Robert Delauany designed the production's sets. Her sketch, left; the costume in a museum, middle; the dancer in the role, right. I don't have sources for any of these images; they all came uncredited from Pinterest. Delaunay is one of a long list of avant-garde superstars who designed costumes or sets for various Ballets Russes productions in 1920s Europe. Based on Cleopatra's success Sonia Delaunay secured several more commissions for large-scale productions, including the Orientalist opera Aïda in Barcelona. In the ballet, two young lovers meet up in a temple in ancient Egypt. Then Cleopatra visits the temple (making a dramatic entrance in a sarcophagus and being sensuously unwrapped from mummy-like layers of multicolored veils; Delaunay used the unfolding of the colors to great effect) and the young man falls instantly way more in love with Cleopatra than the girl he came to meet. He pleads with Cleopatra to let him be with her, and she finally agrees to spend one night with him, only on the condition that he kill himself with poison the following morning (that's a hell of a way to do a one-night stand; no walks of shame for her). The girl who he'd originally met, who was there the entire time, begs him not to, then leaves. She comes back to the temple the next morning to find his poisoned corpse. O, tragedy! That might be the worst way I've ever heard of getting dumped, but it sounds like she dodged a bullet in the end. Imagine being married to such a horny idiot. Anyway the ballet was famous for its sensuality. The dancing was incredibly sexy and the original costumes from the 1909 run appeared to have lots of bare flesh (they were really skin-colored jersy inserts), which was really exciting in Edwardian times. It sparked a craze for sexy Egyptian stuff (think Theda Bara and silent films). All of those clothes and sets caught on fire during a tour of Latin America, so the Delaunays were hired to re-design something new that would still excite people a decade after the original opening. Sonia's designs were less Ziegfield Follies, more bold art deco modern. Her costumes with Robert's sets were a modern explosion of color and pattern. Delaunay's costume designs would go on to strongly influence later designers like Pierre Cardin in his mod space-age collections.

Sonia later recalled Madrid as "a breath of fresh air, a five year vacation" but the Delaunays soon became homesick for Paris. Their artistic careers had grown stagnant in Madrid, meanwhile there was a exciting Surrealism movement underway in Paris. Sonia later wrote that she considered herself French more than anything else; she was only happy in France, and above all in Paris. They moved back in 1921.

 

Projet de salle à manger des Delaunay, boulevard Malherbes, by Sonia Delaunay, 1924. (image via). When the Delaunays moved back to Paris in 1921 they decorated their apartment completely using Dadaist and modernist concepts. Their living example of avant-garde art being integrated into all aspects of daily life was a core value of the Dadaists (as well as Bauhaus and other modernist movements) and won them huge resepct among the cutting edge. The Delaunays invited visiting artists to contribute to the decor, including Man Ray, Hans Arp, and Marc Chagall. Their apartment's reputation also helped them secure interior design commissions around Paris.

 

Sonia or Robert Delaunay (or both), 1921-22, published in Der Sturm, Volume 13, Number 3, 5 March 1922. (image via). This looks so modern to me. It would look good, even edgy, in every single decade since it was made.

Sonia began selling scarves in Paris that used her painting motifs, which proved to be very popular. So she reapproached her patchwork simultaneous dress designs from the old days of the Bal Bullier and began making elegant simultaneous "dress-poems." Her attention was soon turned nearly full time to fashion design.

Only 20 or 30 years prior, fine art was strictly regimented in terms of most to least respected genres; a history painter, for instance,  might be concerned about the impact to his career if he exhibited a series of flower paintings. Yet Sonia Delaunay felt zero compuction about jumping back and forth from serious experimentation in abstract painting and performance, to decorating automobiles and designing flyers, and then back to painting, subjecting each endeavor to the same experimentation with the same concepts and thus uniting them. And it worked for her; she gained both commercial renown and avant-garde respect. Her commercial art was of course not without its detractors. Some critics lamented that her formidable talent was diverted from her worthy painting endeavors to something like fashion design; but as criticism goes, that's not too bad.

Left: a design for some fabric (image via). Middle: two models dressed in Delaunay's designs (image via). Right: Left: Design B53 (detail) for silk fabric, 1924 (image via). The suits were knitted (that was normal back then) and the robes were probably printed silks, also designed by Delaunay. She often designed with draping silks, but also incorporated a wide variety of textures and materials like embroidered wools and colored furs. In 1923 a US fabric manufacturer commissioned Delaunay to design some fabric prints for them, which was a major turning point in her career. She ended up setting up her own print shop and boutique in 1924 called The Atelier Simultané where she could control the quality of printed fabrics (mostly silks) and sell her own designs. Visitors could see the modern paintings covering the walls in the Atalier and understand better what Delaunay was trying to say with the idea of "cubist dresses" or "simultaneous dresses." The small runs of high quality fabrics and the dresses she made from it gained enormous popularity in Parisian high society, and the internatinally. Delaunay was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne in 1927 about the influence of painting on fashion.  

According to an article from the early 1920s, Delaunay was one in a long parade of "reform" clothing designers since Amelia Bloomer, followed by the unpopular "health dresses" of Germany and various others, but what set Delaunay apart was that her clothes were actually attractive. Apparently the stereotype we still have of "artist clothes" already existed back then: huge chunky jewelry, long flowing robes of odd natural materials, and unflattering silhouette. Delaunay had "an eye for beauty," in the writer's opinion, which made her "cubist dresses" much more relevant. "You know," concluded the writer-- and I'm paraphrasing-- "this idea of mixing art and fashion is weird but it makes sense. We should do more of this."

Delaunay preferred a natural (loosely fitting) 1920s silhouette as a base for her dresses. She hoped that by creating interest with the materials, textures and colors instead of silhette, clothing pieces could endure longer. It was a "slow fashion" idea in an era when silhouette had careened dramatically from one extreme to another through the previous three decades, from perky and wasp-waisted with enormous puffed sleeves, to statuesque S-curves, to calf-length drop-waisted shift dresses for boyish figures. We always read about how exciting the changes in fashions were at the time, but apparently there were also people back then who were sick of investing endless time and money in clothes only to have the ideal completely reverse itself in five years. Was Delaunay successful in slowing the race of fashion? Maybe. Her clothes do still look like 1920s pieces but they are wearable (in theory) today. They'd be ridiculously unflattering on me personally, but on a fashion model or singer they'd still look like they belong in the modern world. I would love to wear any of the fabric prints she designed, and could do so even at an office without looking odd. In fact the popular rainbow- hued watercolor theme of the Chanel Spring/Summer 2014 show (beginning around the 12:00 minute mark) is very reminiscent of Delaunay's work including her simultaneous juxtaposition of pattern.

Left: Coat made for Gloria Swanson 1923-24. Wool embroidery on wool. Private collection © Pracusa (image via). Right: a 1925 dress and fabric design by Delaunay, 1925-28. Printed silk satin with metallic embroidery. Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Galliera. © L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623. (image via).

Several fashion designs by Delaunay. Left (image via). Middle: Robe Poème, 1923 (image via). Right (image via). All three designs show Delaunay's love of color; when used in clothes they reminded her of the folk clothing worn at Ukranian festivals of her childhood. The dress in the center was one of Delaunay's "poem dresses," a simultaneous design which sought to unite poetry and fashion. She designed and made several, based on short poems she wrote. Delaunay spoke Russian, German, English and French (and, I assume, Ukranian) from childhood and was a lifelong devotee of poetry. She maintained close friendships with French poets Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, among others.

Left: a Vogue cover (not illustrated by Delaunay) obviously referring to Delaunay's clothes and auto paint designs. (image via). Sonia herself did illustrate other Vogue covers in her fresh colorful style. Right: Two models wearing fur coats designed by Sonia Delaunay and manufactured by Heim, with the car belonging to the journalist Kaplan and painted after one of Sonia Delaunay’s fabrics, in front of the Pavillon du Tourisme designed by Mallet-Stevens, International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris 1925. Bibliothèque nationale de France (image and caption via).

With the Great Depression in the 1930s the demand for luxury silks and hand-embroidered art-clothes dwindled, so Sonia switched back to primarily being a painter. She was happy to do it. While she loved commercial arts, she'd had enough of running a large commerical business. She would, however, continue designing fabrics for Holland-based Metz & Co. through the 1950s.

She did still work as a graphic designer in the 1930s, most notably experimenting with electric lights as part of art and commercial design. Her illuminated advertising posters for Zig Zag cigarette papers at the Salon de la Lumiére in 1937 won an advertising prize. Unfortunately I couldn't find any photos or specific descriptions of how this may have looked.

Throughout the 1930s the Delaunays also worked together to design pavilions for several international expositions; Robert designed the pavilions and Sonia made multiple large-scale themed murals.

Étude pour voyage lointins (panneau mural pour le pavillon des chemins, le Palais de l'air), by Sonia Delaunay, 1937. (image via). This painting is a huge mural for an exposition.

 

Propeller (Air Pavilion) by Sonia Delaunay, 1937. Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden. © Pracusa 2014083 Photo: Emma Krantz (image via). This painting is huge, one of Delaunay's three wall-sized murals for a pavilion at an exposition about technology. Robert had designed some of the expo's pavilions. 

 

In 1941 Robert died of cancer. Sonia devoted years after his death to securing his reputation as a painter and making sure his work was shown and sold and that his contributions to art history were recorded and celebrated. A friend of the Delaunays once commented that, while they and their son were all great creators of commercial arts, not a single one of them were business people at heart, and had a hard time really selling themselves as a brand despite thier successes, implying that a truly business-minded person could have turned their skills into booming business and household names. He held as an example the fact that Sonia had to devote so much energy to making sure Robert's name was well-known in the art world. Sonia's reputation, fortunately, never dwindled in her old age. 

Their son Charles, meanwhile, grew up to become a jazz musician and in 1930 opened the first jazz club in Paris, the legendary Hot Club de France. He and his club jam sessions introduced Django Reinhardt to Stephen Grapelli. During the Nazi occupation in World War II Charles used the club and its tours to spy for the Résistance; he was interrogated but released, while two of the club's co-founders were sent to concentration camps where they were killed. That's all I read about the Delaunay family's experience during the War. Sonia Delaunay was from a Jewish family but she never considered it an important part of her identity, so I don't know if it would have been known by the French or Germans. The Terks, who had adopted Sonia from their Ukranian relatives, had been so wealthy and they'd spent so much time traveling that the antisemitic persecution faced by many in Russia had had little impact on them. Robert and Sonia had moved to Auvergne to avoid the invasion, but Robert, who already had cancer, died soon after the move because of the stress it put on him in his poor health.

After Robert died Sonia lived briefly with fellow Dadaists-turned-modernists Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp. She collaborated with the couple many times through the 1940s and 50s. She continued painting, never abandoning Orphism (which remained surprisingly relevant and appreciated through the decades) and showed her work in major international exhibitions, group and solo, throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s. In the 1960-70s Delaunay's reputation was boosted by the art deco revival (through the lens of mod, psychadelic and "Biba girl" trends). Some of her pieces were issued as tapestries by the fabric manufacturer Gobelins while major museums mounted retrospectives of her work. When Tristan Tzara's The Gas Heart was translated and published in 1977 it included ten illustrative lithographs by Delaunay (perhaps that's where David Bowie saw the costumes he copied in his 1979 SNL appearance). In the 70s she was widely published. One of her paintings was presented from the French President to the US President, and she was named an officer of the Legion of Honor. She died in 1979. 

Here is my own drawing of Sonia Delaunay. I based it on a photograph that may be her or a model wearing her designs (which I changed slightly). I surrounded her with more designs based on photos of people in her atelier wearing her clothes and standing against her paintings and designs on the walls. And of course I wanted to place the patterns against each other because simultanéisme. Plenty of photos of Delaunay survive, so I was easily able to conjure an image of her face.

 

 

This post is part of a series of posts from Inktober 2020 about women artists of the 17-early 1900s who each had some significant connection to Paris, France. Each post focuses on the art-historical context of the artist among her colleagues and ends with a portrait I did in ink of the artist in their style (roughly). Other posts in the series: 

 

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun

Claude Cahun

Cecilia Beaux

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

Bessie MacNicol

Rosa Bonheur

A Round of Poetry-Slam Snaps for the CIA!

Enjoy this article in The Independent (UK) about recent evidence of the CIA's heavy involvement in promoting American Abstract Expressionist art in the 1940s and 50s. What surprised me even more than the cultural promotion itself was that at one time the CIA was so full of art enthusiasts.

The writer, Frances Stonor Saunders, describes the newly-formed post-WWII CIA as "staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA."

Saunders describes the main goal of the program as promoting the US as a haven of liberty and free expression, and New York as a major cultural center, in direct opposition to the heavy-handed, conformist USSR. Despite the legacy of truly radical Russian and early Soviet art movements, leaders in the USSR had quickly created an atmosphere where only the stereotypical "propaganda poster" artwork style we think of today was accepted and where literature was generally aspirational, utopian political writing in the Socialist Realism genre (though Saunders inexplicably passes up the opportunity to use the phrase, "boy meets tractor"). The CIA worked closely with mega-wealthy patrons in the US and abroad, such as Nelson Rockefeller, who readily lent them "Mummy's museum" i.e. the MoMA. People who worked for the CIA also held key positions on museum boards, as cultural promoters, such as Fodor's travel guide writers, and were instrumental in promoting travelling US symphonies, art shows and the like.

A Soviet poster in an acceptable style. [Image: A realistic but idealized poster of Stalin in official uniform holding up a happy blond toddler in front of a sunny blue sky with hints of those puffy Important-Moments-in-History-clouds. The baby wears a white romper, socks and Mary-Jane shoes and holds some white flowers in one hand and a tiny hammer & sickle flag in the other. Stalin looks stern yet avuncular and the whole thing resembles Mufasa presenting Simba in The Lion King. The paint (or lithograph?) style itself is crisp and thinly applied, vaguely reminiscent of prosaic 1950s US advertising illustration. It is slightly painterly, with just enough brush-stroke and strategic unfinished-ness to reference the tradition of European Academic painting.]

Willem de Kooning on the cover of Newsweek in 1965 photographed painting a semi-abstract nude woman. Now I'm wondering if this cover is CIA promotional handiwork. According to the article, the artists themselves had no idea of the involvement. [Image: color photo of an oldish white man in a paint-covered smock mixes paint with a giant palate knife on a giant palate in front of a giant (seven foot?) painting. The painting itself looks messy and violent because of the slashing red brush strokes as well as cartoonish because of the "childlike" crude outlined black eyes and red mouth and the exaggerated boomerang-shaped hips and breasts-- the only discernible features of the otherwise completely abstract collection of oversized pastel brush strokes. The Newsweek logo is printed across the top, with the headline, "Art in New York" superimposed on the painting with the small subheading, "Painter Willem de Kooning," all in black.]

Saunders doesn't mention that the CIA's promotion of AbEx has an obvious precedent in the US government's worldwide promotion of US movies, particularly in the 1910s and 20s when the silent medium was easily shared in any language and Hollywood gave the US a jump-start on worldwide cultural hegemony. I suppose it would also be comparable to the many governments which pour money into their Olympic teams, touring ballet companies and cultural performance troupes as a method of promoting nations. If "ping pong diplomacy" can prove culturally significant, it's hardly surprising that a government would promote its art world-wide as well.

It also makes a certain amount of sense that AbEx would be promoted. I've written before about the link between money, power and the actual form of AbEx art (the relevant part begins about halfway through just after the image and the ***). The art itself is monumental, housed in imposing museums that doubled as displays of wealth and power, creating the same sense of security-meets-fear as when one walks into the lobby of a fancy bank. And the paintings were purported to be universal, to cut through language and historical relativism to affect the viewer on an exciting "primitive" level. If you forget about the eye-rolling with which AbEx tends to be met even today outside of small art-loving circles, AbEx would be a wonderful tool of propaganda even as it was often seen as an act of rebellion. Going back to my previous linked post, the actual involvement of the CIA with Modernism adds another layer to the reactive socio-political motivations I ascribed to the beginnings of Post-Modernism.

What is puzzling, though, is that the job would fall to the CIA and not, say, some completely mundane and transparent Bureau of Culture and Diplomacy or the like. This was all well before the Robert Mapplethorpe kerfuffle when the so-called Moral Majority permanently hobbled the idea of the NEA and more generally the idea of the government subsidizing the arts at all. So why hide that certain people who work for the government also work in the arts? Why would one need to be a CIA operative in order to acknowledge that promoting Pollock might benefit the nation?  Have we really always been that backward? Saunders hints at the extreme unpopularity of AbEx among ordinary tax-payers presenting an obstacle, but shit, that never stopped the US government before.

Ultimately I had several reactions to this bit of news. First, it is so ridiculous. But reading this on the heels of the NSA spying and Edward Snowden "treason" talk (give me a fucking break, he's a whistle-blower not a traitor), it seemed almost quaint. Second, I want to know all the details: who was responsible for what, who knew and who didn't, which shows were endorsed and why, so many questions! Third, I wish Kurt Vonnegut had been able to include this stuff in Bluebeard. Because you know he would have. And fourth... well, the NSA thing again. We're supposed to trust them as Professionals Who Know What's Best and Are Protecting Us, but the more we (are allowed to) learn about secret operations by the various US bureaus, the more farcical their efforts appear. Bay of Pigs? Exploding cigars? Stong-armed art critics who couldn't even win over Congress? Hmmmm....

PS: Hey NSA, since you're reading this, between you and me if you decide to fire up that cultural promotion thing again I volunteer to tour the world on your dime painting portraits. Just consider it.

Artist Is Shocked To Discover Postmodern Theory May Be Relevant To Real Life

I recommend Joshua Alston's thoughtful piece in The Feminist Wire, "Confessions Of A Black Morrissey Fan." I had some immediate thoughts about it but ultimately decided to leave Alston's comment section free of abstruse reflections from this particular long-winded White person. So I'm writing them here instead.

Alston brings up that classic predicament of enjoying art by an artist who personally is odious in some way, whether they violate one's core principles or they are bad, bad people. (I've written about this issue before). Though Alston doesn't mention it many such articles weigh the guilt of giving money and support to the odious artist through CD purchases and the like with the enjoyment the listener or viewer gets from the art. Many also point out that there are many other, better artists out there to whom one could devote time and money, people who could use the money and publicity. So there are typically three considerations for consuming art by odious artists:

1. The effect on the artist,
2. The effect on the viewer, and
3. The effect on (and existence of) the cultural climate in which the art exists and is consumed (i.e. the other artists, what the act of consumption means to the outside world, and even the cultural context in which one may try to judge how relevant the particular act of odiousness is).

For Alston, though, there is the added predicament of not only disapproving of the artist, but also being the object of the artist's aggression because he belongs to a class of people who are made out to be "The Other" by the artist's actions (Morrissey is "probably" racist according to Alston's analysis*, and Alston is a fan who is Black).

When I (a woman) consider the experience of consuming art made by egregious misogynists, of being The Other while involving myself with the artwork, it is different than, say, reflecting on Caravaggio's murderous personal life and thinking, "What an asshole. But this painting is nice." Because Caravaggio's crimes had nothing to do with me it is easy to assume the role of Any Given Viewer of his paintings. He intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer.

But when the odiousness is misogyny I am not Any Given Viewer. I am The Other and the object of alienation. And yet there I am, seeing and judging the artist's work as if I belonged in their very closest circle. It is akin to being accidentally invited inside someone's home when one knows one is not ordinarily welcome. As a viewer that can put one in a position of unexpected power, or it could feel eerie or gross. Even when the viewer puts aside their personal involvement and adopts a clinical interest it is impossible to have that no-questions-asked feeling of invitation into the direct experience of the art.

To put it another way, I said "[Caravaggio] intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer." However when an artist's othering mindset is shared by their culture, and often by the viewer's culture as well, they probably think of a generic "viewer" as automatically not inclusive of that Other. It's a type of attitude which many people are unaware of having in which they categorically speak of "people" and the Other as two separate groups. For instance, "All these immigrants are making it really hard for people to find jobs," ("people" isn't inclusive if "immigrant") or "What nobody understands is that when women say one thing they really mean another," ("nobody" means "no man").

So when the misogynist artist makes art for a "viewer," they don't mean me, and why would they?

It's also an attitude that precipitates the tendency of TV producers to cater to a generic "audience" of imaginary middle class white men, although that is beginning to change. Yet Others in the audience experience this alienation (often as skepticism) at the same time that they get swept along in the emotions and narratives that the artists intend to create, which ultimately distances the Other from the direct experience of getting swept up. The Other instead experiences "getting swept up" as relative to his or her feelings of alienation, and relative to his or her relationship to the artists within society.

A rare flipping of the "audience is automatically male" script: famous "sweater girl" Jane Russell enjoys the other side of the sexually objectifying gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The scene is unusual in that, I assume, it was written for the benefit of women in the audience at the expense of male audience discomfort. [Image: A sporty white woman holding a tennis racket frolics through an array of muscled white men wearing tiny skin-colored swimsuits and sticking their butts up at her. In the background more Adonises in tiny swimsuits strike showy poses while "working out" on gym equipment.]

***

Which brings me, as always, to postmodern theory.

Liz Miller at REDUX: Picturesque Evacuation Ploy

You walk into REDUX to see Liz Miller's installation and you're hit with a shocking orange wall at the same time that a friendly front desk person greets you with brochures. Then you notice the title off to the side of the orange wall: "Picturesque Evacuation Ploy."

You walk timidly around the wall through the opening to the gallery and are hit with this:

The rhythmic part of the installation that greets the viewer when they walk in the door. This is the part that reminds me of the gym. Other people were reminded of dragons. [Image: A wall about ten feet long painted shocking tangerine orange. Seven or eight identical 3-D structures made of thin flat felt emerge from the wall, each about six or eight feet tall and reaching six or eight feet from the wall toward the viewer's walkway. The felt is black, robin's egg pale blue, tangerine orange and blood red. Each piece is cut into intricate decorative shapes made from silhouettes of pistols, rifles and other shapes I cannot make out assembled in a kaleidoscopic manner. The felt pieces are attached using brads with tiny orange heads. Together the structures give the effect of a giant 3-d crepe paper banner than has been made of folded cut paper. On the perpendicular wall the white under-paint is left visible in some spots. At the orange-white border little black shapes march like ants. They could be mice, birds or something else entirely.]

And you say, "Woooooowwwww!"

 You can see the scale of the sculpture in relation to this viewer and her stylin' blue-lined boots: probably fifteen feet tall, like the branches of a giant fir tree.

Then you wonder aloud how she did it, then you gingerly step in between some shapes and briefly fantasize about living in them.

My friend noticed the pistol and rifle shapes first, then I could see them everywhere. At that point I decided to read the Artist's Statement. Miller writes that her installations, "...recontextualize shapes, signs and symbols from disparate historical and contemporary imagery to create abstract fictions. Existing forms from a multitude of sources are co-opted, altered and spliced to create hybrid identities...." 

A small portion of one of Miller's felt shapes where you can see the revolver motif that is otherwise obscured through kaleidoscopic repetition (the revolver points to the left in the image). [Image: flat black revolver shape viewed from the side on a flat white wall]

Dear Readers, at this time I should also explain, as I see it, an art historical/theoretical concept involving deconstruction and post-structuralism generally called, "Death of the Author." The term comes from a 1967 essay of that title by Roland Barthes.

Let's say that Wile E. Coyote is about to fall off a cliff. He holds up a sign that reads, "HELP," drops the sign, and vanishes over the cliff. But a few minute later, along comes a hiker who sees the sign. What does it mean? Well, that depends on what the hiker and their culture brings to the table. "Help Wanted?" The Beatles' "Help?" An offer of help? A meaningless sign in a foreign language? A reminder of their job as a 911 dispatcher? Wile E. Coyote's intentions and psyche become irrelevant and the mesh of meanings and contexts to any given sign, symbol or word, along with the viewer's experience, provide legitimate sources of meaning and interpretation for the sign.

Culturally, for example, this is significant because this essay (and the work of Jacques Derrida, postmodern linguists and others) became popular in the academic world at a time when Western culture, previously seen generally though the lens of middle- and upper-class white male society, was experiencing movements for decolonization, civil rights, women's rights, and GL (later BTQ) rights, as well as foreign involvement in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America, and massive immigration from Southeast Asia, all of which persistently revealed myriad points of view. I can think of many times when someone has made an offensive cultural joke or comment and tried, unsuccessfully, to follow up with, "...but that's not what I meant!" Death of the Author, in action.

Artistically, this idea was central to the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism. Whereas objects of art had been viewed as distinct objects unaffected by a viewer, both physically and contextually, created by an artist whose psyche and intent is up for artistic interpretation, PoMo subverted this. Some artists, like the pristine minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, erased the expressive brushstrokes and fingerprints of the artist, so prized in Modernism, so that the object stood on its own in meditative coexistence with the viewer. Other artists took an interactive approach, such as Felix González-Torres, who made piles of candy in galleries that the viewers could take. Artists sought to make viewers aware of the act of interpretation. Other artists emphasized the power of the viewer in relation to the artistic intent by making themselves pawns in their own art: putting themselves through documented ordeals, for example, or using their own body as sculpture or artistic tool. Still others emphasized the shared physical space of a work of art and the viewer by making intrusive or interactive art or working with installation, which envelops rather than confronts a viewer, as a way of undermining the fixed fortress-like connotations of Modernist paintings and sculptures.

***

So now you can see why, when reading Miller's Artist's Statement, I immediately thought of Death of the Author.   Miller has chosen to literally deconstruct symbols by physically obscuring them and actually bending them. She has stripped the gun symbol down to its physical components and used those components to create a pretty, softly tactile modern fairy-tale environment which suspends disbelieve through sheer craftsmanship and scale. She has also made flat shapes emerge from the wall into the third dimension. Merging painting/2-D with sculpture has been a hallmark of Post-Modernism but is particularly relevant to Miller's physical manipulation of symbols. The lacework of shadows on the walls from the felt recalls Dan Flavin's neon sculptures and their emphasis on the immaterial interaction of artwork and environment. Because the installation is so large and you can step between some of the shapes it is also somewhat interactive. The viewer's space is sufficiently invaded. At this point I interpreted the title, Picturesque Evacuation Ploy, as yet another symbol that had been stripped of its meaning and context, and recontextualised in an abstract fictive manner by putting disparate words together in a nonsensical way. What, now, does "picturesque evacuation ploy" even mean besides the title of this specific show?

But I think there are other conflicting messages in this show that make it much more than an homage to the Death of the Author. For instance I mentioned that my friends and I immediately wondered how she created the installation. Hand-cut or laser-cut? How was it assembled, etc. Because of the level of in-your-face craftsmanship the viewer's attention is immediately diverted to the artist creating the piece. What was her process, what were her intentions? Moreover, even as I appreciate how Miller has stripped the symbols of their meanings, I still wonder, why those symbols? I revert back to the generally acknowledged meaning of "gun" as a weapon while I wonder why she chose that symbol to deconstruct. The repetition also poses a problem for me: making a marking into a symbol is supposed to add meaning rather than remove it. And repeating an image ad nauseam a la Warhol's "Marilyn" can make an image into a symbol. But repetition can also, like Warhol's repeated $ sign, strip a symbol of its meaning. The title is beginning to recover some, if not much, of the words' former meanings and becomes, like the show, attention-grabbing and complicated, evocative of a beautiful emergency.

The gun is in some ways an apt metaphor for the show: it's a visual assault in bright colors that creates a "Bam!" effect when you walk in. The shapes seem machine-like and, along one wall, rhythmically echo a military drumbeat. Walking through the gallery feels a little like walking through the interior world of any given addled person with a gun who makes tragic headlines: sort of crazy, poundingly rhythmic in some places, culminating in a frenzied upward spiral of jumbled shapes.

The irony is clear: fuzzy soft pretty gun shapes in felt. Pretty guns dominating an environment created by someone who, because of her gender, is more likely to be a victim of gun violence, and because of her nationality (I assume she is American) willingly or unwillingly, benefits from massive military violence perpetrated by the US.

A portion of the less structured side of the installation, showing how the shapes continue fluidly from 2-D wall images to a 3-D structure. Also shows the full height (fifteen feet?).

Miller's Artist's Statement goes on to read, "...Forged relationships between benign and malignant forms confuse the original implications of each while revealing the precariousness of perception and how easily it can be tampered with. Recent projects pit Baroque and Gothic pattern and ornament against forms derived from armor and weaponry. Seemingly oppositional pairings create duplicitous environments where conflicting messages are conveyed." 

My mind was already heading down the rabbit hole of military actions and public perception: the Iran-Contra Affair, the CIA, proxy wars, police actions, the military-industrial complex, war-time bans on free press, censorship of images of dead soldiers, the complicit media. At this time the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of repetition began to sink in. How Miller, like the media, has numbed the symbol of the gun and created something vibrant and attractive in its place. The small symbols that march ant-like around the orange/white borders suddenly leap off the wall-- or out of the distant space of our television sets-- and clash in three dimensions, in a way that invades our physical space. How it all takes place in an installation that looks fun and contemporary, like an anime future-world or Tord Boontje for Target. I reconsidered the title: "picturesque," attractive, staged; "evacuation," escapism, vacuousness; "ploy," conspiracy, coy persuasion. A misleading invitation to escape into attractive fictions. 

A portion of the less structured side of the exhibit showing the orange paint on the floor and the play of light and shadow cast by the felt.

I stupidly missed the Artist Lecture, so this whole post could be way off base, but the show will remain up at REDUX through November 26, 2011. Go see it!!

Djuna Barnes, by Peggy Bacon

Djuna Barnes, by Peggy Bacon. [Image: Loose pencil sketch on beige paper of woman in suit top with a black slanted hat that silhouettes her profile. Drawing is so simple it's almost cartoony but is realistic.]

Sketch of modernist author Djuna Barnes. I saw a first or second edition copy of Nightwood at Goodwill and bought it, simply because of the glowing foreward by T.S. Eliot (even though I'd never heard of it or her and I kinda snickered at the name). For a year I've been making my way through it in five-page chunks. It's a short book, but dense and weird with lots of European references that I have to look up and some that I can't ("you know how aristocratic Jewish Germans are!" Actually, no I don't and Wikipedia cannot help me out. That's not a direct quote btw).