Cubism

Sonia Terk was born in Russia in 1885

She came to Paris in 1906 after studying at St.Petersburg and Karlsruhe in Germany .
Painter, illustrator, and textile designer who was a pioneer of abstract art in the years before World War I.
In 1909 she married the critic Wilhelm Uhde (a friend off Picasso's), but divorced him to marry, in the next year, the painter Robert Delaunay. She was the wife and collaborator of the French painter, with him she founded the Orphism movement and they did many of the set and costume designs for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe.
together they pioneered the Modernist Movement and explored color theory.
Parallel to her career as an abstract artist she also had an important influence on textile design internationally. She was awarded many prizes and her work is in most important public galleries.
Biography :
Born in the Ukraine as Sonia Terk, she grew up in St. Petersburg, studied drawing in Karlsruhe, and then moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists. She married Robert Delaunay in 1910, by which time she was painting in the style known as orphism, which involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure color. She extended Orphist principles to the design of fabrics, pottery decoration, theatrical design, and other applied arts.In addition to fashion and textile design, Sonia Delaunay also created costumes for the Ballets Russes and early cinema, book bindings, furniture and interiors.
Among her most important works were her Orphist illustrations for a poem by Blaise Cendrars entitled La Prose du Transsibérien; the resulting volume was a landmark in modern book production.Her books, created in collaboration with the great Surrealist authors, are masterpieces of abstraction. Major works on paper include "La Prose du Transsiberien," 1913; "Ses Objets, ses peintures, ses tissus simultanes, ses modes," 1924; "Compositions, couleurs, idees," 1930 and "Rhythmes - Couleurs," 1966.

During the 1920s Delaunay designed textiles and dresses, and her use of abstract color harmonies had a strong influence on international fashions. She returned to painting in the 1930s, and with her husband she designed vast murals for the Paris Exposition of 1937. After her husband's death in 1941, Delaunay continued to work as a painter and designer, and she lived to see the mounting of retrospectives of her work by major museums from the 1950s on. In 1964 she became the only woman to have had an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in her own lifetime. ...

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