MASTERPIECES FROM THE BEN URI COLLECTION
SONIA DELAUNAY (1885-1979)
POSTER FOR GALERIE BING, PARIS
1964
Poster paint and adhesive lettering on paper
Signed (within poster): Sonia Delaunay
SONIA DELAUNAY
Sonia Delaunay’s Poster for Galerie Bing, Paris (c 1960s–70s) exemplifies her enduring commitment to the fusion of art and design, and her pioneering role in the development of Orphism a movement she cofounded that sought to unite abstract art with lyrical color and rhythmic harmony Created during the later
later phase of her career, this poster reflects both her avant-garde roots and her increasing engagement with commercial and applied art as legitimate forms of modern artistic expression The design is structured around dynamic circular and radial motifs, rendered in vibrant, contrasting hues blues, reds, oranges, and greens arranged to create optical movement and visual rhythm These forms echo her earlier experiments with simultanéisme, a theory of color interaction rooted in the principles of Chevreul and the chromatic dynamism of the Fauves and Cubists The poster functions not only as an advertisement for Galerie Bing, a prominent Parisian venue for modern art, but also as a self-contained artwork that asserts the aesthetic potential of typography and geometric abstraction. By integrating modernist abstraction into a functional graphic medium, Delaunay blurs the boundary between fine and applied art The Poster for Galerie Bing embodies her vision of a total art one that permeates everyday life with color, energy, and the spirit of modernity
Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern in 1885 in Gradizhsk, Russia (now Ukraine) and was adopted by her maternal uncle at the age of five, taking his name (Terk) She grew up in St Petersburg exposed to music and art, and learned several foreign languages She moved to Germany to study drawing in 1903 and two years
later settled in Paris, France, studying at the Académie de la Palette, and discovering the work of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, as well as Matisse and Derain In 1908 she married the German collector and art dealer, Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), whose Montparnasse Galerie Notre-Dame des Champs showed her first solo exhibition Through Uhde, she encountered many painters including Picasso, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), and in 1910, after the couple divorced by mutual consent, Sonia married Delaunay, with whom she had a son in 1911.
Together Sonia and Robert Delaunay pursued the use of abstract colour in painting and textile design One of her first largescale works was the painting of the Bal Bullier (1912–1913), a popular Parisian dance-hall The Delaunays were ardent promoters of abstract art, and associated with Orphism or Orphic Cubism, which focused on pure abstraction and bright colours They became members of the Abstraction-Création group in 1931 and organized the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1939. In 1953 the Galerie Bing mounted a solo show, and her work was also included in exhibitions in Paris and Rome. In 1964 (following her donation of 117 works by herself and her husband), Delaunay became the first living female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre In 1966 she exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London as one of 20 invited Women's International Art Club (WIAC) exhibitors In 1999 eight of her costume designs were included in a selling exhibition of Jewish Stage and Film Designers at Ben Uri Gallery Sonia Delaunay died in Paris, France in 1979 and her work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Higgins Bedford, and Tate, and represented extensively in international museum collections
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
COLLECTION: https://benuri org/collections/
BURU: https://www buru org uk/
