Worth the wait

By A.C.

TATE MODERN in London has made a concerted effort in recent years to give international modern female artists the recognition they have long been denied. None was a greater pioneer of abstraction, nor more overshadowed by a famous husband, than Sonia Delaunay. A dazzling new retrospective now restores the Ukrainian-Russian artist to her rightful place at the centre of the 20th century's avant-garde.

The exhibition is a revelation for those who knew Delaunay only through the prismatic rainbow paintings she made alongside her husband, Robert. The artist revealed here through more than 200 works—from paintings to an astounding variety of textiles, books, costumes, fashions and furniture—was a truly modern, experimental woman energised by the possibilities of the new century. The show charts a 60-year career of bold and original solo work and ceaseless collaboration with other founders of early modernism and Dada, from Blaise Cendrars to Apollinaire, Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Tristan Tzara.

Sonia Terk was born in Odessa, raised in St Petersburg and studied painting in Germany before arriving in Paris in 1906 at the age of 21. A serious intellectual, she chafed at bourgeois convention and sought "a vibrant life" abroad. This vibrancy is evident throughout the show, which was first presented last autumn at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. It proceeds chronologically, starting with Delaunay's early paintings, inspired by the strange bright colours of the French "Fauves". These portraits, like "Finnish Woman" and "Yellow Nude", are experiments in unconventional skin colour and decorative background as masterful as those of André Derain or Henri Matisse.

Her passion for colour dovetailed with the interests of Robert Delaunay, a scene-painter whom she married in 1910. The pair jointly explored optics and perception, developing a new kind of painting based on contrasting colour and movement, which they dubbed "Simultanism". The rainbow arcs and orbs of this period reflected the "pulses and vibrations", Delaunay later said, of the time in which they lived. A large gallery entitled "Modern Life" is awash with colour, flanked by two large paintings, "Electric Prisms" and "Le Bal Bullier", which in their light and movement brilliantly evoke the speed and intensity of this new, electric era. In a central vitrine are a colourful patchwork waistcoat and ladies' dress, among the earliest examples of what would become Delaunay's "fusion of artwork with the ongoing stream of everyday life".

Fashioning what her husband called "wearable paintings" was the first step towards Delaunay's outpouring of work in the applied arts. During the first world war, while living in exile in Spain and Portugal, she had already branched out as an entrepreneur who decorated public and private spaces through a business called "Casa Sonia". Back in Paris she designed costumes for the Ballets Russes, and throughout the 1920s the Delaunay home served both as salon for the avant-garde and showroom for her decorative art. The largest gallery in the exhibit holds an almost overwhelming assortment of such textile work. Highlights are rotating bolts of bright geometric fabrics and embroidered clothes in square, modern shapes, including a black-and-tan coat made for the actress Gloria Swanson.

This creativity outside the realm of painting led later critics to dismiss and marginalise her, the show's excellent catalogue explains. But Delaunay herself, drawing on a Russian heritage allied with the Arts and Crafts movement, did not distinguish between "fine" and "applied" arts. (Gender was not relevant, either: a progressive woman, she had previously wed a gay man in order to resist her family's demand that she return to St Petersburg.) Yet at the same time, her turn toward design was largely pragmatic: she supported her husband and son financially after revenues from some Russian property were cut off by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

"For Sonia it was about expressing her ideas—she didn't feel constrained to work in any particular medium," says Juliet Bingham, a curator of the show. What is significant is that, following Robert's premature death in 1941, she first devoted herself to ensuring his legacy, then turned back to "fine" art, presenting herself foremost as a painter in photos from the 1950s until her death in 1979.

The couple's final work together included murals commissioned for the Paris Exposition of 1937. These monumental paintings dedicated to aviation soar. Subsequent rooms show Delaunay's huge body of increasingly abstract paintings incorporating black and darker hues. She lived long enough to see her work accepted by French critics as "existing in its own right". It has taken a century to give her the international exhibition she deserves, and it should not be missed.