Galerie Paul Prouté

Sonia Terk was born in 1885 in Gradizhsk, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. After studying drawing in Karlsruhe, she moved to Paris in 1905, where she continued her training and discovered the artistic avant-garde. She married Robert Delaunay in 1910 and, apart from the years she spent in Spain and Portugal during the First World War, lived primarily in Paris until her death in 1979.

Sonia Delaunay was drawn to color from the very beginning. From her earliest Parisian paintings, influenced by Fauvism, she explored its full range of possibilities and continued to deepen her investigation of color throughout her career. It was, however, in the decorative arts—through the creation of fabrics, clothing, and objects that she designed and marketed with a genuine entrepreneurial spirit—that her exploration of color found one of its most original forms of expression. She gradually developed a vocabulary of increasingly refined geometric forms that led her, alongside her husband, one of the pioneers of this approach, toward the new territory of abstraction. The artist’s prints and drawings, whether finished works or preparatory designs, are among the most eloquent testimonies to her pursuit of a “pure painting,” founded on the interactions of color and on “simultaneous colors,” which Apollinaire named “Orphism.”