Sonia Delaunay

Artist
Sonia Delaunay
Attraction
Entrance archway with Luna Luna sign
Born
1885 Hradyz'k, Ukraine - 1979 Paris, France

Delaunay co-founded the movement Simultané (“Simultanism”) with her husband and artist Robert Delaunay.

Though best known as a painter, Delaunay had a successful career in fashion, textile, and graphic design.

She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre in 1964.

Fairground view: Sonia Delaunay, Entrance archway with Luna Luna sign. Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

Fairground view: Sonia Delaunay, Entrance archway with Luna Luna sign. Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

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.

Fairground view: Sonia Delaunay, Entrance archway with Luna Luna sign. Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

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.

A key figure in the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde, Sonia Delaunay co-founded Simultané (“Simultanism”), a movement based on geometry and color theory.

Fairground view: Sonia Delaunay, Entrance archway with Luna Luna sign. Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987.

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.

Forgotten Fantasy

Now open at the shed, nyc

Thirty-seven years ago, Luna Luna landed in Hamburg, Germany: the world’s first art amusement park with rides, games, and attractions by visionaries like Basquiat, Haring, Lichtenstein and Hockney. By a twist of fate, the park’s treasures were soon sealed in 44 shipping containers and forgotten in Texas — until now.