Sonia Delaunay
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. 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.
If you own a work by Sonia Delaunay
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.