Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is the story of a woman who played a significant role in the avant-garde of Paris in the 1920s. A working woman, wife and mother, Sonia Delauney was married to Robert Delauney who gained wide recognition as one of the leading stars of modernism. Sonia herself had to wait until the 1960s before her own abstract art received the acclaim it had long deserved. When she married, she remained in the background, despite producing a wide variety of art - paintings, drawings, clothes, costumes, book bindings, tapestries and carpets, as well as the original commercial fabric designs of the 1920s and 1930s.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Delaunay influenced both the art and fashion worlds with the bold colors and abstract forms of her fashion and textile designs and paintings. Baron, an editor with art publisher Thames & Hudson, and Damase, a poet and author (Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, Abrams, 1991), present Delaunay as an independent artist who became an avant-garde force along with her husband, Robert. While the book provides insight into Delaunay's character through photographs and excerpts from her journals, it also chronicles her growth as an artist by including excellent representations of her textiles, gouaches, and fashions. In the most poignant parts of this book, the authors describe Delaunay's quest to ensure exposure and respect for her late husband's work and chronicle her later years, when she finally received recognition apart from her husband. Because the work is more comprehensive than Damase's solo effort or Sonia Delaunay: Art into Fashion (Braziller, 1986), it is highly recommended for fine arts collections in academic and large public libraries.‘Julie C. Boehning, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Jacques Damase produced the first monograph on Sonia Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabric (CH, Sep'91). Now in collaboration with Stanley Baron, who had full access to her journals and personal records, he has written her biography. This book is just as much about her husband, Robert Delaunay, as it is about her. Her life with Robert, who had a wild temper, was not easy, but they were both part of the Paris "scene" of the 1920s and 1930s (with artist friends Picasso and L'eger and the poet Blaise Cendrars), and they influenced each other's work in many ways. She influenced the color in Robert's paintings. ("In matters of colours, he had absolute confidence in me and always followed my suggestions.") Her abstract work frequently shows a motif taken from Robert's observations of the halo around the electric light bulbs that had replaced the gas lights. In the 1920s and 1930s it was, above all, her work in commercial fabrics that was recognized. Only in the 1960s and '70s, the last two decades of her life, did her abstract color paintings finally receive a deserved recognition. General; undergraduate. M. Kren; Kansas State University

Kirkus Book Review

An artist whose career spanned the whole of the modernist movement is finally receiving her due. The wife of modernist painter Robert Delaunay, Russian-born Sonia was an artist in her own right. But it wasn't until years after Robert's death from cancer in 1941 that she emerged from his shadow and was recognized by the art community as a real force. Samples of her early sketches provided by Baron, a senior editor at Thames and Hudson, and poet Damase, who was also a good friend of Sonia's, show her talent in representative drawing, but she soon eschewed more traditional forms for the colorful, energetic abstract designs for which she is well known. Sonia not only painted but designed costumes, carpets, book jackets, clothing, and more. Still, her primary devotion was to her painting, which she practiced until the very end of her life: She died in her studio in 1979, at the age of 94. (115 color plates, 88 b&w illustrations)