A key figure in the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde, Sonia Delaunay created vivid and colorful work spanning painting, fashion, and design. With her husband, artist Robert Delaunay, she co-founded Simultané (“Simultanism”)—a development of Cubism based on the theory that our perception of colors changes when contrasting colors are placed side by side, to be experienced simultaneously. Abstract compositions such as Bal Bullier (1913) and Electric Prisms (1914) celebrate the energy of contemporary dance and the advent of electric street lighting through Delaunay’s trademark use of concentric circles and opposing colors.

Delaunay experimented with Simultanism in other forms of design, creating bold, geometric costumes for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in addition to tapestry, textiles, and fashion. In 1913, she premiered her first “simultaneous dress,” featuring a bright patchwork of colors, and later opened Atelier Simultanism in Paris, where she created colorful and accessible designs for hats, umbrellas, scarves, and shoes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Delaunay continued experimenting with abstraction in the postwar years by incorporating more angular forms and harlequin colors.

Delaunay envisioned her work for Luna Luna when she met André Heller before her death in 1979. Continuing her lifelong fascination with the intensity of contrasting colors, she designed an archway decorated with geometric shapes in bright hues of red, green, blue, black, and yellow to welcome visitors into the fairground.