Sonia Delaunay, 'Living Profoundly'

This essay examines Sonia Delaunay's efforts to promote her simultaneous dresses made in 1913-14. Departing from traditional art-historical accounts which treat Robert Delaunay's simultanism as a painterly, modernist practice, I situate Sonia Delaunay's fashions and her attendant publicity as an avant-gardist move from art into life. Throughout, the essay traces how Delaunay strategically photographed herself wearing her dresses and promoted the circulation of such photographs within the popular and avant-garde press as a means of generating visibility and attention for herself as a (woman) artist. Highlighting the gendered constraints that originally led her to the applied arts, the essay ultimately argues that Delaunay offers an early and alternative art-into-life narrative of the avant-garde: one in which a woman artist embraces the everyday and the decorative arts only to turn that embrace into a highly visible, public, and sellable production.