One for the Ages: Sonia Delaunay’s Wearable Abstractions

If Wassily Kandinsky bent the visible world to the whims of his canvas, reducing concert hall scenes to puddles of color and line, Sonia Delaunay seems to have worked the other way around.

A fashion and textile designer by trade, the Ukrainian-born Delaunay (1885-1979) filled the world with bold and delightful patterns — with the chevrons and dot grids and floral wiggles of the many scarves and dresses she created in France — then let her paintings reflect the results.

Or at least that’s the impression given by the Bard Graduate Center’s “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” a playful but rigorous unearthing of 184 garments, artifacts and paintings — most on loan from France — spanning 60 years of Delaunay’s career.

In museums and textbooks, Sonia tends to stick with her husband, the French painter Robert Delaunay, whom she married in 1910. Around that time Sonia, originally trained as a painter in the Fauvist tradition, brought fabric into her practice. Friends of the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, the two became fixtures of Europe’s early abstraction and regularly exhibited together, even after Robert’s death in 1941, and often at Sonia’s behest.

But the shared vocabulary Sonia and Robert developed in the 1910s and ’20s — the bisected circles and radial segments that fill both of their canvases — can be hard to parse when museums display the two painters together, as they often do.

Indeed the current show’s curators, Laura Microulis of the Bard Graduate Center and the Delaunay specialist Waleria Dorogova, don’t always isolate their subject. As you study the long accordion book “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeannie of France” (1913), where Sonia stenciled serpentine, tutti-frutti shapes in gouache alongside a column of verse by Cendrars, you would be forgiven for mistaking her as the author of the “Portuguese Still Life” (1916) on display in the same room, Robert’s pastel canvas where concentric ripples emanate from the cores of fruits and vases on a table.

The inclusion of Robert in the show, while it affirms the old “power couple” reputation of these two artists, seems designed to restore to view Sonia’s say in the creative partnership.

For instance, a black-and-white photo from Portugal, where the couple briefly lived during World War I, explains that the rippling force fields in Robert’s still life were not entirely his invention. Sonia had emblazoned jugs, vases and tablecloths with thick zigzags, pie pieces and bull’s-eyes. Robert was merely recording her scene: a whole vibrating kitchen that exemplifies something Sonia articulated in an interview much later — hence the show’s title and theme — that “I have lived my art.”

Textiles, though, are our best shot at getting Sonia alone for a moment. While both Delaunays painted, only Sonia dyed, embroidered, quilted and sewed. Bard displays cloches, handbags, dresses, curtains, upholstery. On the first floors of the exhibition, her “Robe Simultanée” and the “Gilet Simultané,” a patchwork dress and vest from 1913, obey the same downward vortex patterning of her paper collage “Solar Prism” (1913) and the same contrasts of texture employed much later in her painting “Rhythm-Color” (1970).

Some very strong moments of exhibition design (no easy feat with so many oddly shaped, fragile and iterative objects) pay off in a wall of crepe silk swatches from Sonia’s workshop. She called them “simultaneous fabrics” after the latest buzzword for the multimedia reach of the new abstraction: “simultanism.” Pattern 86, which Sonia designed in 1925, shows a waving brick motif in a gradient of blue. Pattern 182 from 1926, with its interlocking red and black boxes, is a work of early color minimalism on par with her German contemporary, the geometrist Josef Albers.

Inspired by the theorist Michel Eugène Chevreul — whose 1839 treatise on color harmony is on display in this show — Sonia and her fellow pioneers in abstraction had to train the individual elements of color, such as contrast and inversion and value, to speak for themselves as never before.

Floated in glass dividers between the swatches are Sonia’s instructional “color cards” to the fabric manufacturer. Exacting and propulsive, these colorways show that she understood the kinships and rivalries of hue with a shrewdly marketable instinct.

Her rugs, tapestries, mosaics, record sleeves and automobile designs, from the 1960s and ’70s, show the Pop era craving this elder stateswoman on things. On a looping monitor, a music video follows the young chanteuse Françoise Hardy through partitions of Sonia’s design. (If you are in Los Angeles, you can still see one of her final works, the triumphal arch to Hamburg’s art amusement park of the 1980s, Luna Luna.)

Back in 2012-13, the Museum of Modern Art blockbuster “Inventing Abstraction” retraced how Sonia’s cohorts succeeded in casting off subject: Albers borrowed from stained glass, Kandinsky from the composer Schoenberg, Robert Delaunay from the sun. He’d stare at it until inverse colors violated his retinas, then paint what he saw.

Sonia was a fixture of that impressive roundup, and her 2011 show at the Cooper Hewitt taught Americans that her overlooked fabrics were also modern art. But only in Bard’s dense wardrobe of a show do the sources of Sonia’s painterly voice become obvious: the bunchable, joinable, repeatable textures of cloth.

The paintings she made while mourning Robert have all the flapping urgency of marine flags. Her pulse-quickening “Rhythme” of 1945 folds stripes of geometry like a scarf. In one of the show’s many photos, Robert paints their friend Thérèse Bonney in one such muffler of his wife’s design. Sadly not on view, though reproduced and discussed in the hefty catalog, is her very first abstraction, from 1911: a patchwork quilt for their son’s crib.

A big step toward the renaissance lately enjoyed by Sonia’s sister in textile minimalism, Anni Albers, this show tugs at the seams binding Sonia to Robert in the brocade of European modernism. It’s a welcome American spotlight on a visionary already beloved in France, and a big-shoes-to-fill prelude for the Guggenheim’s upcoming survey of her Parisian scene.

A century later, Sonia’s collisions of form and function still excite and inspire. “As in poetry, so with colors,” she wrote for a 1966 exhibition. “It is the mystery of interior life which liberates, radiates, and communicates. Beginning there, a new language can be freely created.”

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art

Through July 7, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3000; bgc.bard.edu.