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Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara
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Acquired from Librairie René Cluzel, Paris
Acquisition 2004
Date 1956
Size 29 x 23 cm.
Signature KOOPM K 345
Sonia Delaunay played a pivotal role in the development of the French artists' book during and after World War I. Together with Blaise Cendrars, she created La prose du Transsibérien (1913) which is now considered the most innovative book of that age, with its rapid succession of art movements. She also remained active after this, and collaborated with another author after World War II: the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.
She created four gouaches for Le fruit permis Delaunay elected to do the illustration in a technique called pochoir, using templates from which the painted area had been cut. A template was made for each colour, so the combination as a whole had to be considered in advance. She usually had the templates made by others; the actual painting in gouache (in watercolours as well in other books) was manual work that she did herself. The borders are a little frayed, because she wanted to emphasise the manual work by avoiding mechanical lines. Some borders and planes have been visibly altered by brush. The colours are still extraordinarily fresh, lively, intense, even frisky, and convincing. It was printed in an edition of sixty copies.
Delauney (born Sonia Terki in Ukraine) together with Robert Delaunay developed a theory of colour based on scientific research that demonstrated that to the human eye, blue is different next to green than it is next to red, and that some colour contrasts create the illusion of movement. The Delaunay couple's concept of 'simultaneity' worked with colour contrasts and dissonants. They used simple basic shapes like circles and squares. Delaunay came up with thousands of variations on these basic shapes, decorating any item that came within her reach. First inside her home: quilts, book-bindings, trunks and clothes. Later, outside her home as well: costumes for the theatre, curtains and rugs for Metz & Co. Even a Citroën car had its day in the sun. The effects may be compared to those of the German Bauhaus movement, with one critic remarking that Delaunay achieved in France by herself what it took a whole school to accomplish in Germany.
(PVC)
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