Sonia Delaunay: Art into Fashion
from George Braziller
The exciting, novel fashions of Sonia Delauney, a member of the avant-garde movement in Paris in the early twentieth century, heralded the advent of a radically new concept in clothing design. Like many champions of Modernism, Sonia Delauney believed that art should be used to redecorate modern life, and that design should be truly artistic. By applying the bright colours of the peasant costumes from her native Russia to the elegant silhouettes that were currently in vogue in Paris, she translated theory into practice and produced a stunning series of clothes for the Jazz Age. Like the contemporary Orphist paintings created by her husband Robert, Sonia Delauney's designs are characterised by their vibrant colours and sharply patterned geometric collages. They were worn by starlets Gloria Swanson and Gaby; her imaginative theatre costumes were commissioned by another great advocate of Modernism, Diaghilev, for the Bullet Russes. Indeed, Sonia Delauney's clothing, as exalted in the poetry of Tristan Tzara and Guillaume Apollinaire, epitomised the spirit of the new age.
Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics
by Jacques Damase
from Thames & Hudson
The Russian-born artist Sonia Delaunay, who with her husband, Robert Delaunay, was a leading light of the Cubist splinter group Orphism, branched out after the First World War into a distinctive career of her own. Between 1920 and 1930, a decade full of activity and success, she produced some of the most striking and original fabric designs of modern times. She was the inventor of abstract design for fabrics, and her materials--brightly colored and filled with geometric patterns--were the rage among fashionable circles in the Art Deco era. Delaunay made imaginative waistcoats for Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Ren Crevel, and other Surrealist poets. She dressed Gloria Swanson and various French film stars, the unconventional socialite Nancy Cunard, and the wife of the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. She also designed interiors in collaboration with the Paris architect Mallet-Stevens and created costumes for the early films of Marcel L'Herbier. Her fabrics were sold by Liberty's in London and many of the most exclusive department stores in New York. Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars wrote about her fashion designs, and her decorative scarves are known to have had an influence on the work of Paul Klee. Jacques Damase, the French publisher and art historian, is intimately familiar with all of Delaunay's original designs and fabric samples. In many cases both the design and the sample still exist, and this is the first time most of them have been photographed. Damase has written an appreciation of Delaunay, and has also assembled a representative selection of writings by her contemporary admirers and critics. The result is a definitive record of this unusually talented artist's contribution to commercial design. These dazzling, exciting designs are artworks in themselves; the fact that they had a practical purpose makes them even more admirable.
Sonia Delaunay Patterns and Designs in Full Color
by Sonia Delaunay
from Dover Publications
Sonia Delaunay: Art into Fashion
Sonia Delaunay
Covers the Russian-born avant-garde painter's career since 1903 and her efforts to free color from form in abstract, fashion, commercial, and interior design.
Sonia Delaunay: The Life of an Artist
by Stanley Baron
from Pub Overstock Unlimited Inc
Sonia Delaunay, a Retrospective
Sonia Delaunay : the life of an artist / Stanley Baron, in collaboration with Jacques Damase
Sonia & Robert Delaunay.
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