Sonia Delaunay
Sunday, 11 August 2013
From top to bottom: Blanket (1911), Solar Prism (1914), Electric Prisms (1914), Rhythm (1945)
“A world of color would be ideal, where one could create emotions accordingly. We could live by impressions the way a blind man lives by touch. We could vivify or seduce, transmute or emote, the possibilities are endless. A world of color so fine and pure, from the deepest innermost part of the human body to the pale washed evasiveness of the white of the human eye. We could live in a constant state of aura where every feeling manifested itself by color thus removing the lie from mankind.
Sonia Delaunay took an early, perhaps the earliest jump into non-objectivity where color elicited form. Her work serves swift proof of a tenacious intensity with which she threw herself into her art, her life. She lived a philosophy of emotion; delving, gouging, tasting, creating. Through a direct communication with the gut, she relied on intuition rather than intelligence, as did men of stature such as Geothe. She strived to emulate such greatness.
Her work is the embodiment of myth and legend, of the God-like strength granted to man. In that sense it is a proud rival to the majesty of ancient cultures in which there was no separation between art and life. Sonia Delaunay is the modern earth goddess. The ancient was Gaea. She sang the music of the sea and the wind. Primitive sensibility and the communication with the baseness of the earth began there. And the personification of rivers took place in pediments, plant life grew from the tops of columns. One simply entered the inner-self and emerged fresh with the proportion, stylization, and technique fitting.”
-Excerpt from longer interview with the artist conducted by David Seidner (republished in BOMB)