SONIA DELAUNAY AND HER HALOS OF LIGHT: What are the dangers of ‘giving in’ to a history of darkness, when you can easily follow the mysteries of light?

SONIA DELAUNAY AND HER HALOS OF LIGHT: What are the dangers of ‘giving in’ to a history of darkness, when you can easily follow the mysteries of light?

During the time span of Sonia Delaunay, there were two major and horrible world wars and this is very important to note.

During the first world war, Sonia and Robert Delaunay relocated to Spain and Portugal.  Robert was accused of being a deserter, although he was declared unfit for military duty at the French consulate in Vigo on June 13 1916.  

Having already met and married by 1910, the couple had, by the time the first world war begun, launched their simultaneous colour studies.

Sonia was already fascinated with the effect of light on solid objects.  Originally Sonia Terk, Ukranian born in 1885, was experimenting in pictures, inspired by Van Gogh and Gaugain.

Two Finnish Girls 1907

In her diary she writes:

“The way in which objects and forms are broken by the light give the painting a new structure.  The halos of the electric lamps make the colours and shadows vibrate around us like unidentified objects, like allies of the insane”

Her pictorial structures began to dissolve into halos of light.  In ‘Flamenco Singers’ 1915.

Flamenco Singers

This was especially exciting in an age when electrical light was new. She began to be fascinated with simultaneous contrast, taking the colours of the solar spectrum and juxtaposing them with their complementary colours.  She got them to play one another off so that each tone reaches out to bring out the other.

                                     

She then took the ‘halos of light’ and formed abstracted paintings of colour, where the colour was the subject.

“Abstract art is the beginning freedom from the old pictorial formula where colour has a life of its own.  But a genuine new art will only begin when we understand that colour has a life of its own and that their infinity combinations of colour have poetry and a poetic language that are much more expressive than has been shown in the past.  It’s a mysterious language in harmony with the vibrations…”

She wanted to capture the excitement of the new age of electrical light in “Electrical prisms”

Electric prisms 1913

                       

It could NOT be said that Sonia Delaunay hid her light under a bushel!  In fact, she took the advice from the old book almost literally:

"No one, when he has lit a lamp, puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, that those who come in may see the light. The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light; but when it is evil, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore see whether the light that is in you isn't darkness. If therefore your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly full of light, as when the lamp with its bright shining gives you light."

So that while the rest of the society was fleeing to the darkness of conflict, this extraordinary couple were busy ‘lighting up’ and following their intuitions and mystery.  One could call it ‘my story’ and not living ‘his story’ which was simply flocking to the usual dark solution of conflict, intimidation, interrogation, to solve the darkness and problems caused by conquering and attachments.

At the current time of her creativity, some first world war poets were declaring the futility of their darknesses. Siegfired Sassoon, although he initially marched thoughtlessly into battle, soon wrote of the darkness and suffering of the trenches, and wounded by a sniper in 1917, he was sent home to England to recover, going on to write his declaration of war, in which he denounced the conflict as "a war of aggression and conquest," writing "I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust"

“I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust”

George Bernard Shaw wrote about “the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the war’s bloodshed”

Yet at this time the Delaunays were getting 'richer'. There was a hive of industry, creativity and a thriving inspiration in the Delaunay household on the Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, the products of which are still inspiring those of today to live in peace.  Sonia, living for almost a century she produced a vast range of creative works, from design, fashion, fabric and paint.

It could be said that creativity is a step itself for war prevention, and that any current war mongers are probably starved and deaf from the sound of their own creative muse and intuition.  Thanks to this couple, we can be inspired that happiness and creativity can be ours rather than the misery of conflict.

After the Russian revolution, she lost her income of a rented home and began working with Sergei Diaghilev.  She also opened a fashion boutique on Boulevard Malsherb in 1921, Gloria Swanson being one of her clients.

At the time of the Dada movement, she incorporated the poems of Tristan Tzara into her dresses, by creating ‘poem dresses’ where she sewed the words of the poet into the fabric.

Just before world war two, despite mounting tensions, she participated in the last universal exhibition as ‘the association of art and light, and decorated the Rail and air pavilion bringing an ‘immense explosion of springtime light and enthusiasm’

After the war, she worked on her abstract images.  “Abstract art is only important if it is the endless rhythm where the very ancient and the distant future meet”

“Colour is liberated and itself becomes a subject”

Her home was a source of light and inspiration for other artists of her time:  Apollinaire, Cendrars, Sartre and Stravinsky.  We should listen to her wise words, though only about colour and its power to be the subject of an image, for her understanding hold the keys to real living way beyond any battle monger.

"Abstract art is only important if it is the endless rhythm where the very ancient and the distant future meet"

The retrospective of her work is currently on show at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne.

Other relevant posts: Niki de Saint Phalle: Feminist or just our female side?
WHO WAS HER MUSE? SUZANNE VALADON