Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was a Russian-born French painter and designer who, with her husband Robert Delaunay, founded Orphism, a movement that pushed Cubism toward pure color and abstract rhythm. Born Sara Élievna Stern on November 14, 1885, in Hradyzk in the Russian Empire, she was sent at age five to live with her wealthy maternal uncle Henri Terk in Saint Petersburg, where she was raised as Sofia Terk in cultivated, well-traveled comfort.

She studied drawing in Karlsruhe and arrived in Paris in 1905, settling at the Académie de la Palette. A 1908 marriage of convenience to gallerist Wilhelm Uhde gave her independence; in 1910 she divorced him to marry the painter Robert Delaunay, with whom she would share a lifelong artistic partnership. Her 1911 patchwork quilt for their newborn son Charles, often cited as the spark for their abstract experiments, applied the principles of simultaneous color contrasts to fabric.

From 1912 onward she produced canvases such as Bal Bullier and Electric Prisms in which interlocking discs and arcs of pure color generated visual movement. She designed Blaise Cendrars's 1913 illustrated poem La Prose du Transsibérien, costumes for the Ballets Russes, fabrics, and the famous robes simultanées. The Russian Revolution cut off her family income, and from 1925 she ran the influential Atelier Simultané fashion house in Paris.

After Robert's death in 1941 and the war years in Grasse and the Auvergne, she resumed painting and printmaking with renewed energy. In 1964 she became the first living woman to have a retrospective at the Louvre. She died in Paris on December 5, 1979.

The name Sonia is a Russian and French diminutive of Sophia, from the Greek sophia meaning wisdom. She bore the feminine form.