Les Ponts I

Born in 1885 into a poor Jewish family in the Ukrainian village of Gradizhske, Sonia Delaunay – joint founder of Orphism – was to become one of the central figures in the 20th century avant-garde movement. Together with her husband Robert Delaunay, she developed an artistic language which conveyed the harmonious qualities of colour above all else.

It was Sonia who managed to apply her aesthetic theories beyond the canvas, through her textiles, clothing and interior design, thus fusing modernist art and daily life in an unprecedented way. In 1964 she became the first living female artist to be given a retrospective at the Louvre in Paris. She died in 1979, happy for having, in her words, ‘lived my art’.