Sonia Delaunay

 Sarah Stern, known as Sonia Terk-Delaunay (1885-1979), was born in Ukraine into a modest family. Entrusted to her uncle Henri Terk, she was raised in a wealthy and cultured environment in Saint Petersburg.
After receiving training as a painter in Germany, she moved to Paris in 1905, where she discovered avant-garde movements such as Fauvism and the art of Gauguin, which influenced her early works.
She met the art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, with whom she arranged a marriage of convenience: he could thus conceal his homosexuality while she could continue working in France. Through Uhde, she met the young painter Robert Delaunay, then close to the Cubist and Futurist movements. They quickly divorced to marry in 1910. Their son, Charles, was born, for whom she created a patchwork blanket inspired by Russian peasant motifs. This piece from 1911 is considered by the artist as her first abstract work.
Sonia and Robert Delaunay engaged in what they called "simultaneous art", working on the same subject on different media. The discovery of Chevreul's work on color contrast gradually led them towards an abstraction that stemmed from their research on vision. Fascinated by the synesthesia between arts (music, decorative arts, poetry, architecture), they developed an art capable of expressing the intensity of modernity.
A versatile artist, Sonia Delaunay experimented with interior decoration and design, then ventured into fashion, opening a boutique in the 1920s to support her family. She gained international recognition by working for New York-based brands and designing costumes for the film industry.
Upon Robert Delaunay's death in 1941, Sonia retired to Grasse until the end of the war. To promote abstract art, she participated in the creation of the Salon des réalités nouvelles in 1946. Convinced that Robert Delaunay's work was not adequately recognized, she endeavored to highlight it. She exhibited alongside artists from the Concrete Art movement.
Sonia Delaunay received numerous awards throughout her career and became the first woman to be offered a retrospective of her work during her lifetime, by the Louvre Museum in 1964.