Delaunay, Sonya

The first five years of her life she spent in the town of Gradizhsk, Poltava province , where her father, Elia Stern, worked as a manager at a nail factory ^[1] . Mother - Hana Tevelevna Stern (nee Turk) - came from Odessa .

Since 1890, she lived in St. Petersburg , was raised in the family of a maternal uncle, a prosperous lawyer Genrikh Timofeevich (Genikh Tovievich) Terk and his wife Anna Sergeyevna (Izrailevna) Zak (1856-1911), the daughter of Israel’s philosopher and semitologist Isaakovich Zak (1831 -1904), the nieces of a major Petersburg banker and financier Abram Isaakovich Zak (1828-1893) and Palestinian journalist Grigory Yakovlevich Syrkin (1838-1922) ^[2] . Heinrich Timofeevich Turk (1847-1917) was a member of the board of the publishing house and joint-stock company Brockhaus and Efron , he headed the boards of the Bogatovsky Sugar Plant , the Irinovo-Shlisselburg Industrial Society , the partnership of the Serginsko-Ufaleysky Mining Plants , and the Joint-Stock Company of the Finland Light Shipping Company . Other uncles - graduate of the Medical and Surgical Academy (1881) Yakov Tevelevich (Timofeevich) Turk (1850—?), Worked as a railroad doctor in Libava , and in the Crimea in the 1920-1930s; Mark Tevelevich Terk, the owner of the office for the sale of agricultural equipment in Odessa (8 Gradonachalnitskaya St.).

She wanted to be adopted by the Turk family, did not receive permission from her mother, but she took the pseudonym Sonya Turk. The family traveled to Europe, the girl visited the largest European museums. Her abilities in painting were noticed by a school drawing teacher, on his advice she went to study at the Karlsruhe Art Academy at the age of eighteen. In 1905, having read Julius Meyer-Gref’s book Manet and his Circle, she decided to move to Paris as an art center.

In Paris, she was unsatisfied with the academic manner of teaching, but spent a lot of time in art galleries. It was influenced by Van Gogh , Gauguin , Russo , Fauvists . She married a German collector, gallery owner and art critic Wilhelm Ude in 1908. In 1909 she met the artist Robert Delaunay , in 1910 she divorced her first husband and married Delaunay (she was already pregnant from him).

Under the influence of cubists, Sonia Delaunay after 1911 moved away from naturalism and figurativeness in her works towards geometry and abstraction, experimenting with rhythm and color decomposition. In 1913, Apollinaire , who introduced the Delaunay spouses to Blaise Sandrar , called the version of Cubism, which Sonya and Robert developed in their works, Orphism. Sonya created illustrations for Sandrar's cubist poem, “Prose on the Trans-Siberian Express and the Little Joan of France” (1913, the geometry of this work influenced Paul Klee’s search).

The spouses spent the years 1914-1920 in Spain and Portugal, made friends with local artists. In Spain, Sonia Delaunay met Sergey Diaghilev , renewed the burnt scenery of Leo Bakst for the ballet Cleopatra directed by Mikhail Fokine for his presentation at the London Coliseum ( 1918 ).

In 1920, upon returning to Paris, Sonya opened a fashionable atelier. In 1925, she participated in the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts along with Alexandra Exter , Nadezhda Lamanova, Nathan Altman , David Shterenberg . Sonya became the largest art deco master; her finds were widely used in design, ceramics, scenography, and advertising.

In the 1930s, it was close to the abstractionist searches of Kandinsky , Mondrian , B. Hepworth , M. Söfor .

She is also known as a book illustrator and designer of haute couture fabrics and theater costumes. She also worked on sculpture, ceramics and watercolor . According to her sketches, a deck of playing cards with drawings of the Cubism style was published in Germany (Bielefelder Spielkartenfabrik GmbH, 1965). Together with her husband, she participated in the design of the Paris World Exhibition of 1937, for which she created panels of 235 square meters. m. Also together with Robert Delaunay organized the Paris Salon of the Arts Realite Nouvel .

The son of Sonya and Robert, Charles Delaunay (1911-1988), was a major music columnist, manager, fan and jazz historian. Cousin - engineer Alexander Yakovlevich Turk, writer, translator, member of the Religious and Philosophical Society , author of a number of textbooks ^[3] .

Sonia Delaunay is the first artist to have a solo exhibition in the Louvre ( 1964 ).

In 1975, she became an officer in the Legion of Honor .

• Delaunay-Turk Turk Sonya / V. A. Kryuchkova // Grigoriev - Dynamics. - M .: Big Russian Encyclopedia, 2007. - P. 476. - ( Big Russian Encyclopedia : [in 35 vols.] / Ch. Ed. Yu. S. Osipov ; 2004—2017, vol. 8). - ISBN 978-5-85270-338-5 .
• Damase J. Sonia Delaunay: fashion and fabrics. New York: HN Abrams, 1991
• Baron S., Damase J. Sonia Delaunay: the life of an artist. New York: HN Abrams, 1995
• Malochet A., Bianchi M. Sonia Delaunay, atelier simultané. Milan: Skira; Bellizona: Museo villa dei Cedri, 2006.
• Die Welt der Malerei, Köln 1990

• Eugene Demenok. Sonya Delaunay returns to Odessa. http://odessitclub.org/publications/almanac/alm_44/alm_44_199-207.pdf
• Works in museums of the world
• Sonia Delaunay: A Life Full of Color
• Sonia Delaunay (French)
• Portraits of Sonya Delaunay (Fr.)