BOOK REVIEW : Portrait of an Artist as Emblem of Her Time

Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation by Axel Madsen (McGraw Hill: $24.95, 365 pages)

Hidden away in the working-class and artist-studio area near the Pere LaChaise Cemetery on Paris’ Right Bank, the tiny, graffiti-covered “Passage Delaunay” is, according to art writer Pascal Letellier, both emblem and monument to the city’s street artists.

Embroiled in the controversial urbanization that the quarter is undergoing, its stenciled, spray-painted images and messages attest to the tenuous survival of both artwork and artists even in a city famous for its respect and commitment to both.

That this obscure passageway should bear the same name as Robert and Sonia Delaunay is an ironic coincidence. Members of the avant-garde movement that created the spirit of revolution and innovation concomitant with 20th-Century painting and visual art, their contributions have been overlooked in the aftermath of affection focused on such names as Picasso, Braque and Chagall. As pioneers of both “simultaneity” and “deconstruction,” as well as in the experimentation of art and fashion, the Delaunays are a fascinating profile of an era that forever changed our view of the world within the work of art and beyond it. While Robert’s reputation rests largely on his contributions to Cubism, it is Sonia who embodies the essence of her time through her conflictive and controversial approaches to both life and work.

Based on journals, diaries and correspondence with Sonia Delaunay as well as with the couple’s only son, Charles, “Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation” by Axel Madsen is, first, the biography of the artist, and second, a reference work on the painters, poets and luminaries with whom she worked in Paris during the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Abounding in anecdotes about such figures as Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Peggy Guggenheim, the book also chronicles the social and historical circumstances that formed a backdrop to the period and to Sonia Delaunay’s life, including World Wars I and II, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Nazi occupation of France. These events, moreover, shape the extraordinary metamorphosis of Ukraianian-born Sarah Stern to Sonia Terk, then to Sonia Uhde and finally Sonia Delaunay.

That transformation is in itself indicative of the social structures of Czarist Russia into which Sarah Stern was born in 1885. As the second child of a poor provincial working-class family, she was adopted at age 5 by her mother’s wealthy lawyer brother and his wife. In the Terks’ St. Petersburg home, she enjoyed cultural and educational advantages of a social circle that included both Jewish and Gentile bankers, lawyers and politicians. Sarah Stern became Sonia Terk and began exploring the world of painting through her uncle’s collection and visits to the Hermitage.

By age 15, she already had manifested a serious interest and talent in drawing. The interest would develop into a passion that would supersede the social conventions of her time as well as her ties to family and country, and lead her on a pilgrimage to Germany for her initial studies and eventually to Paris, a pilgrimage from which she would never return.

It also would lead her into a marriage of convenience with Willi Uhde in order to escape the stigmas and restrictions that bound an unmarried woman of that era, and it would lead to her unconventional marriage to Robert Delaunay and to their collective efforts as artists. Finally, it would lead to her individual exploration of her own potential as a painter. Yet, despite the exemplary qualities inherent in this biography of a powerful, passionate artist who breaks the bounds of the solid conformity and duty that tie women in particular to ritual and tradition, “Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation” fails to develop real insights into the psychology and drive behind her life. Perhaps the overabundance of material about the figures surrounding her becomes too tantalizing. At any rate, Madsen’s tone often lapses into gossip, and the reader is left hanging by off-hand references to names and events. Madsen’s real contribution as a biographer may lie, finally, in the assertions and questions he raises about the roles, concepts and ideologies played, conceived and carried out by this singular group of players in a seminal period of our cultural history.