dress-poems at Tate Modern

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Tate Modern is currently hosting the first UK retrospective of the work of Sonia Delaunay, who is known for her bold use of colour, movement, and abstraction. As the exhibition richly illustrates, Delaunay’s contributions to modernism spilled over from fine art into set and costume designs for theatre and dance, interior design, commercial publishing, advertising, fashion, and textiles.

During a career as artist and successful businesswoman spanning most of the twentieth century, Delaunay collaborated with others including her husband, artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed a distinctive approach to abstraction and colour, which they called simultanism. This interest in the rhythmic and vibrant effects of simultaneous contrast can be seen in her paintings, collages, book bindings, painted boxes, and garments, many of which have been brought together in this wonderfully energetic exhibition. She was also interested in the simultaneity of text and other forms of visual expression; she worked with Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, producing the Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France 1913, in which the poet’s fictional journey from Moscow to Paris was accompanied by her stencil illustrations.

The exhibition also features some sketches from her series of dress-poems. The 1920s sketches are all that survive of these garments, for which she drew on the work of avant-garde poets such as Tristan Tzara, Vicente Huidobro, and Joseph Delteil to create ‘poems in motion’. These elegant dress designs feature her characteristically bold, graphic shapes – zig-zags, diamonds, circles, and lines – incorporated with painted words. The lettering is read across sleeves, waistlines, hems, and other seams and structural features of the garments, drawing the whole of the female body into an intensely visual and mobile expression of simultaneity.

341125 Sonia Delaunay, Dress-Poem no.1329, 1923

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased, 1980 © Pracusa 2014083

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