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SONIA DELAUNAY. ART, DESIGN AND FASHION
4/7/2017-15/10/2017
Curator: Marta Ruiz del Árbol
This summer the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting Sonia Delaunay. Art, design and fashion, the first exhibition in Spain to be entirely devoted to this artist. As such its intention is to emphasise not only her important role as an avant-garde painter but also the way in which she successfully applied her aesthetic ideas to everyday life.
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Posted 6 June 2017
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Delaunay’s work as a painter will be exhibited in the Museum’s galleries alongside her designs for books, theatrical sets, advertising, interiors, fashion and textiles as well as items of clothing. In total there will be 210 exhibits loaned from public institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée de la Mode de Paris and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, as well as from private collections. The exhibition, which is benefitting from the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, will thus reflect recent art-historical research which has reassessed Delaunay’s career with the aim of highlighting the multi-disciplinary nature of her work which allowed her to explore supports and techniques other than painting.
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Early Paris years
At the start of the second decade of the century Simultanism dictated Sonia Delaunay’s activities as she painted and made objects and clothes that reflected this new and colourful aesthetic. A bedspread for her son’s cot is the first object traditionally described as Simultanist. This was followed by a painted toy box, book covers, everyday objects and clothes sewn together from different pieces of cloth. Delaunay combined her avant-garde experiments with the influence of Russian folk art.
Her first creations reveal her quest for a total art, illustrating her desire to introduce the Simultanist aesthetic into popular culture. The Delaunays’ apartment, a Sunday gathering place for artists and intellectuals, was the first venue where these Simultanist creations were exhibited in the manner of an art gallery. Sonia was committed to focusing without distinction on the widest range of supports, considering all forms of artistic expression to be of equal merit and worthy of exhibition. Thus, for example, at the famous Autumn Salon in Berlin in 1913 she exhibited paintings, poster designs, book bindings and domestic objects in the company of works by Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, among others.
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It was this context, in which fashion, painting and avant-garde were closely interconnected, that gave rise to the “Simultanist dress” as a form of introducing the public to the new visual language. The Delaunays wore Sonia’s creations and transformed Parisian dance halls such as the Bal Bullier into laboratories where they experimented with Simultanism in an initial attempt to renew the aesthetic of the city through colour. With their provocative mixtures of colours and materials, they caused a sensation and the couple became “reformers of how to dress” in Apollinaire’s words.
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Return to Paris
In 1921 the Delaunays returned to Paris. The Spanish experience encouraged Sonia to produce clothes for Parisian women based on the designs of her paintings in the manner of tableaux vivants [living paintings]. During those years she worked with Dada and Surrealist groups on theatrical and film projects, including Le P’tit Parigot (1926) by Le Somptier. In 1925 Delaunay enjoyed success with her participation in a decorative arts exhibition and she began to work for one of the large Dutch department stores, Metz & Co., a commercial relationship that lasted until the 1950s.
This section of the exhibition emphasises the artist’s multifaceted and versatile manner of approaching artistic creation, from painting on canvas to textiles, tapestries, lithographs, set design and even commissions for murals. Objects displayed in this section include an architectural model (1942), two dresses never previously included in an exhibition (1926), a swimming costume and a matching beach parasol and bag (1928), together with a number of earlier designs and the oil painting Simultaneous Dresses (1925) in which the garment worn by the central figure is similar to the overcoat that Delaunay designed for the actress Gloria Swanson that year and which is also on display in this gallery. Complementing these exhibits are the fashion photographs taken by Delaunay herself and a colour video which she made in 1925 to promote her designs. Finally, there is an extensive section on her textile designs which reveals the creative process behind her clothing, from the initial drawing on paper or light card to the final product and including the correspondence that the artist maintained with the Metz & Co., department store, to which she sent samples of cloth and guidelines for the production of her creations.
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EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Title: Sonia Delaunay. Art, design and fashion
Organiser: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
With the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid
Venue and dates: Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 4 July to 15 October 2017
Curator: Marta Ruiz del Árbol, curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Number of works: 214
Publications: Catalogue with texts by Cécile Godefroy, Marta Ruiz del Árbol and Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti, and digital publication on the Quiosco Thyssen app
VISITOR INFORMATION
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Address: Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid. Moneo exhibition galleries, 1st basement level
Opening times:
From 4 July to 3 September 2017: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am to 10pm; Sundays, 10am to 7pm
From 4 September 2017: Tuesdays to Fridays and Sundays, 10am to 7pm; Saturdays, 10am to 9pm
Single ticket type: Permanent Collection + temporary exhibitions:
-Standard ticket: 12 euros
-Reduced ticket: 8 Euros for visitors aged over 65, pensioners, students with proof of status and Large Families
-Free entry: children aged under 12 and officially unemployed Spanish citizens Advance ticket sales at the Museum’s ticket desks, on its website and on tel: 91 791 13 70
See the Agenda Textile is more!>
MUSEO THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid, Spain
+34 914203944 / +34 913600236
prensa@museothyssen.org
www.museothyssen.org
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