Sonia Delaunay

She arrived in Paris in 1906 after studying drawing in Karlsruhe, and quickly absorbed the city's ferment of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. A marriage of convenience to the German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde allowed her to remain in France legally; she divorced him in 1910 to marry the painter Robert Delaunay. Their shared obsession with color theory produced what they called simultanéisme - a method of placing contrasting colors directly against one another to generate optical vibration and a sense of movement. When Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism in 1913 to describe what the Delaunays were doing, he recognized something that went beyond painting into a total redesign of visual experience.

Sonia's 'Bal Bullier' (1912-13), a large canvas depicting couples dancing at a Parisian bal musette, showed that her approach to color could hold scale and energy simultaneously. But she was never content to work in one medium. From the late 1910s she began producing abstract textile designs, embroideries, and patchwork objects, and in 1923 she delivered fifty fabric designs to a Lyon manufacturer using geometric shapes and bold simultaneous contrasts. Her fashion house, the Maison Delaunay, opened in 1925. The clothes she made were cut to allow freedom of movement; she argued that dress should work with the body, not impose a silhouette on it. Her boutique in Paris, shared for a period with the fur designer Jacques Heim, attracted clients from across Europe and America.

After Robert Delaunay's death in 1941, Sonia withdrew to the south of France and spent years in relative quiet. When she returned to the Paris art scene in the 1950s, younger painters discovered her work as a precursor to hard-edge abstraction. Her 'Rythmes-Couleurs' series - interlocking discs and arcs built purely from color relationships - became some of the most reproduced images of twentieth-century abstract art, and she issued a body of prints and editioned works through which the imagery reached a much wider audience.

In 1964 she donated 117 works by herself and Robert to the French state, which triggered the organization of a retrospective at the Louvre - the first given to a living female artist in that institution's history, inaugurated by André Malraux. She went on to donate her entire graphic work to the Centre Pompidou in 1976. She died in Paris in 1979 at the age of 94.

On Auctionist, 38 works by Delaunay have been tracked across Nordic and international auction houses. Prints and engravings account for 16 of those appearances, with original works, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and paintings making up the balance. Pandolfini Casa d'Aste in Florence accounts for the largest volume, but Nordic presence is consistent: Bukowskis Malmö, Bruun Rasmussen (Lyngby), Auktionshuset Thelin & Johansson, and Crafoord Auktioner Lund have all handled her works. The top price recorded on the platform is 81,250 CHF for 'Rythme coloré' (F.9, 1953), followed by 26,000 SEK for a work from the 'Poésie de mots, poésie de couleurs' portfolio and 21,250 CHF for an abstract composition. A preparatory costume design for the ballet 'Cleopatra' reached 3,000 EUR, reflecting the breadth of her output across fine art, design, and the decorative arts.