Sonia DELAUNAY (Gradizhsk 1885 - Paris 1979)

Study for Zenith Made in 1914 Gouache, watercolor and pastel on paper 30 x 44.5 cm (12 x 12 in.) on view Total sheet 31,5 x 46 cm Numbered, monogrammed and dated lower left "494 S.D 14 On the back of the protective cardboard, the label of the traveling exhibition "Sonia Delaunay" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Tate Modern in London Provenance: Private collection, France Exhibitions: Sonia Delaunays Welt der Kunst, November 30, 2008 - February 22, 2009 Bielefeld Museum of Art. Sonia Delaunay, The Colors of Abstraction, Paris, October 17, 2014 - February 22, 2015, Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Sonia Delaunay, London, April 15 - August 16, 2015, Tate Modern. Sonia Delaunay: Art, design, fashion, Madrid, July 4 - October 15, 2017, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Sonia Delaunay, Humlebæk, February 12, 2022 - June 12, 2022, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Bibliography: Sonia Delaunays Welt der Kunst, November 30, 2008 - February 22, 2009 Bielefeld Museum of Art, Kerber, 2008, reproduced p. 65. Sonia Delaunay, The Colors of Abstraction, Paris, October 17, 2014-February 22, 2015, Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - London, April 15-August 16, 2015, Tate Modern, ed. Paris-Musées, reproduced p.87. Sonia Delaunay: Art, design, fashion, Madrid, July 4-October 15, 2017, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, reproduced p. 54, no. 14. Sonia Delaunay, February 12, 2022 - June 12, 2022, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, reproduced p. 25. Sarah Stern, known as Sonia Terk-Delaunay, was born into a modest Jewish family near Odessa. She was raised by her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, who belonged to the wealthy bourgeoisie of St. Petersburg. She received a solid education, traveled to Europe and discovered the European art museums. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1904 and moved to Paris the following year where she attended the Academy of the Palette in the Montparnasse district. The artist experienced a Fauvist period upon her arrival in Paris. In 1912 Sonia and her husband Robert Delaunay turned to abstraction. They carried out plastic research based on the constructive power of color and invented Simultanism. It is about embodying modern life by introducing the simultaneous contrast of colors in painting. Modern life and the observation of colors and shapes under electric light inspired him in 1914 to create the work "Electric Prisms1 ". Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars had known each other since the end of 1912 and worked intensely together on the concept of Simultaneism; the poet with words, the painter with different mediums, which led them in 1913 to create their poem-image which was the first simultaneous book2 : the "Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France" written by Blaise Cendrars and then illustrated and formatted by Sonia Delaunay and published by Les Hommes nouveaux in October 1913. Zenith is a Swiss watch factory founded by Mr. Georges Favre-Jacot who enjoyed a great reputation at the beginning of the 20th century and who called upon artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique to do the necessary promotion. Sonia Delaunay read the poem that Blaise Cendrars had composed in 1913 in Saint-Cloud. " Zenith Record! Noon beats On its solar anvil The rays of light St-Cloud August 1913 Blaise Cendrars3 " Sonia Delaunay incorporated the poem by her friend Blaise Cendrars into some twenty works4 , drawings, paintings or collages, three of which are kept at the Centre Pompidou5. It is not known to this day whether Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay responded to a commission from the Zenith company. Sonia Delaunay was passionate about the question of time and its pictorial translation. Solar noon is the moment when the sun reaches its culmination point, its zenith. This state of culmination is characterized in Étude pour Zénith by circles and semicircles of bright color, the color yellow is applied in a pure way. Sonia Delaunay inserts the Zenith typography in a succession of sequenced, simultaneous colors and proposes a vibrant visual translation of time. Christine Le Quellec Cottier states: "Associated with Sonia's simultaneous colors, the poem transformed the mechanics of time and gave it the depth that words, alone, did not yet achieve. The time becomes movement, it beats, and it diffuses "rays of light": the hands of the watch transform the space-time in spectrum of colors, they search the thickness of the mechanics by metamorphosing it6 ". 1 Oil on canvas, 250 x 250 cm, Centre Pompidou, inventory number AM3606 P. 2 Miriam Cendrars, Blaise Cendrars, la Vie, le Verbe, l'Écriture, Paris, éditions Denoël, 2006, p. 299. 3 Document kept at the Swiss National Library (shelf mark P3 of the Blaise Cendrars Collection) in Le Quellec Cottier, Christine. "Nos yeux vo