Sonia Delaunay valuation
Took abstraction off the canvas and onto dresses, cars, book covers and dance floors.
Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Stern in Ukraine in 1885, raised in St Petersburg, and settled in Paris in 1906.
What a work by Sonia Delaunay is worth
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Bio
Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Stern in Ukraine in 1885, raised in St Petersburg, and settled in Paris in 1906. With her husband Robert she developed Simultanism — colour discs and arcs whose contrasts generate movement — and unlike him she refused to keep it inside a frame. A patchwork quilt she made for her son in 1911 is often taken as the first work; from there came textiles, dresses, painted cars, theatre design, book bindings, the Boutique Simultanee, and decades of work in commercial design that she never treated as secondary. She was the first living woman given a retrospective at the Louvre, in 1964, and died in 1979.
The range is unusually wide and the categories carry very different values: oils on canvas, gouache and watercolour designs for textiles and costume, actual printed and woven fabrics, bindings, and a large late output of pochoir and lithographic editions. Many gouache designs exist in near-identical variants, which is original to how the studio worked, not a warning sign. Textiles and works on paper have serious light-fastness issues. The Delaunay estate and the catalogue work by Jacques Damase are the reference points.
At a glance
- Born
- 14 November 1885, Hradyzk
- Died
- 5 December 1979, 7th arrondissement of Paris
- Movements
- Orphism, Simultanism
More on Wikipedia.
The Lyon silks and the 1925 album
In 1923 the Lyon silk firm of J.-B. Martin commissioned fifty designs from her for printed silks and velvets, and their success led her to set up a design studio under her own name in her Paris apartment, selling fabrics, clothes and furnishings. In 1925 the Librairie des Arts Décoratifs published an album of twenty plates, Sonia Delaunay: ses peintures, ses objets, ses tissus simultanés, ses modes, coloured by stencil and showing her paintings, textiles, clothes and objects.
Plates from the 1925 album are often framed and sold singly. They are fine stencil-coloured reproductions of her designs made in her lifetime, and should be described as plates from the album rather than as original gouaches or signed prints. Tate Modern's retrospective in 2015, her first in Britain, gave the textiles and fashion the same space as the paintings.
Uhde, Madrid and Casa Sonia
Her father was foreman of a nail factory, and at five she went to live with her mother's brother, Henri Terk, a lawyer in St Petersburg, who adopted her in 1890; she took the name Sonia Terk. In Paris she enrolled at the Académie de La Palette but spent more time in the galleries, and in 1908 she made a marriage of convenience with the German dealer Wilhelm Uhde, whose gallery showed her work. She met Robert Delaunay in 1909, divorced Uhde in 1910 and married Robert that November. The quilt she made for their son Charles is now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne.
The war kept the Delaunays in Spain and Portugal from 1914. In Madrid in 1917 they met Sergei Diaghilev, and she designed costumes for his Cleopatra, decorated the Petit Casino nightclub and opened Casa Sonia, a shop for interiors and fashion with a branch in Bilbao. Back in Paris from 1921, she designed the set and costumes for Tristan Tzara's Le Cœur à gaz in 1923 and opened a fashion studio with Jacques Heim in 1924. With Jacques Damase she published the pochoir albums Rythmes-Couleurs in 1966 and Robes poèmes in 1969, and in 1967 she designed the pattern for a Matra 530 in a fundraising exhibition of artist-decorated cars.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
