Summer Reading

A must read: Sonia Delaunay by David Seidner for the Winter 1982 issue of BOMB. 

In 1964, Sonia Delaunay became the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. She was seventy-nine. The work on the walls included paintings, textiles, scarves, theater costumes, upholstery, and fashion — the full range of a practice that had never recognized the distinction between fine and applied art as meaningful.

Delaunay and her husband Robert developed Simultanism — a color theory built on the idea that contrasting hues placed in proximity produce optical vibration, a rhythm as immediate as music. She applied it first in painting, then to a quilt, then to a coat for Gloria Swanson, then to a collection of silks for a Lyon manufacturer, then to interiors. The Louvre, eventually, accepted all of it.

Literature was another entry point. In 1921, she began incorporating the poetry of Surrealist and Dadaist writers directly into her designs — creating what she called "dress poems," garments whose color combinations were derived from words rather than from visual reference. Her collaborators included Tristan Tzara and Blaise Cendrars, writers for whom form and content were similarly inseparable. Language became palette became cloth became something worn on a body moving through a room.

Two models wearing fur coats designed by Sonia Delaunay, 1925, via Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Maison Sonia Delaunay, published by Artbook, traces the full arc of that work — sketches, textiles, paintings, fashion and interior designs — and contains the first scholarly essays on her collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim. It is the most complete account of how Simultanism moved from canvas to the surfaces of modern life.

The Perrier collaboration is worth dwelling on. Working with his Lyon silk house through the 1920s, Delaunay developed patterns that applied the optical logic of Simultanism to woven fabric — color relationships that behaved differently in motion than at rest, that shifted as the cloth moved across a body. The commercial context is sometimes treated as a footnote to the fine art work, though it really shouldn't be — the constraints of industrial production, repeating patterns, fixed colorways, fabric that has to work on a person moving through a room, pushed the theory somewhere painting alone couldn't go.

The Heim essays are equally worth your time. Couture in the 1920s and 30s was one of the few industries where a woman could operate at the highest level with genuine creative authority, and Delaunay used that position seriously. Her fashion work wasn't a sideline — it was a parallel laboratory. A garment has a body inside it, moves through light and rooms and time, and the stakes of color are simply different under those conditions than they are on a wall.

Across all of it, the book makes the same point Delaunay spent her life making: that color, handled with sufficient intelligence, can reorganize how a space or a surface feels to be inside. That turns out to still be a live question.

"I love creation more than life, and I must express myself before disappearing."

Sonia Delaunay

What holds up about Delaunay, a century on, is not the biography but the perspective. The argument that the objects people live with deserve the same quality of intention as objects behind glass is not a romantic one — it is an organizational principle that determines what gets made, how it gets made, and what proves worth keeping. It is also the argument that runs through most of what the shop carries. A Victoria Morris bowl, a Clam Lab ceramic, a Studio Augustin pillow — none are positioning themselves as art objects. They were made to be used, and the intention is in the making.