The queen of the 20th-century avant-garde
47 DELAUNAY, Sonia.
Ses peintures, ses objets, ses tissus simultanês, ses modes. Paris: Librairie Des Arts Décoratifs, [1925] £15,000 [ 159354 ] Folio. Original decorated boards, lettering to front and rear cover in black, with silver wire ties. Text and prints unbound as issued. 20 pochoir coloured plates of costume and textile designs. Sheet sizes: 38 × 56 cm. Boards darkened with small splits to spine corners, text gathering lightly foxed, plates a little age toned, one nicked edge, otherwise all bright images. ¶ Cristina Giorcelli & Paula Rabinowitz, eds, Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I , 2011.
First edition, first printing, inscribed by the artist on the front pastedown: “à monsieur Bernard Nevill, Sonia Delaunay, 23–9–69”. Nevill (1930–2019) was design director for Liberty Prints from 1961, during which time Delaunay produced many designs for Liberty. A professor of textile design at the Royal College of Art and an inveterate collector, Nevill “was once advised by Karl Lagerfeld to be more gentle with his opinions after he told Helena Hamlyn that her dress was ‘totally disgusting’” (obituary, The Times ). Nevill’s opulent house in Chelsea was used for Uncle Monty’s London home in the filming of Withnail and I . Delaunay was one of the most prominent and innovative artists of the Paris avant-garde in the early 1900s. Her greatest success came in 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, for which she designed and decorated her Boutique Simultanée; this lavishly illustrated volume was published to coincide with the display of her designs. “Delaunay transported modernist aesthetics onto the body through a very modern medium: fashion . . . she saw clothes as ways of articulating bodies in space. With dresses that had a straight neckline, little complicated seaming, and no waistline, she
gave enormous importance to color, which, in her opinion, determined the rhythms of the geometrically patterned textiles that she designed . . . Taking her inspiration from popular culture as well as from her native Ukrainian folklore, she was encouraged in her undertakings by Marc Chagall, who, from a similar ethnic and cultural background, was working in Paris in those years and had become a close friend of Delaunay’s husband, Robert. Delaunay was among the earliest fashion designers, if not the first, who came close to approaching the prét-à-porter system of production, thanks to the pochoir (stencil) technique. Had she pursued it, this technique would have allowed mass production of her designs without loss of tonal integrity” (Giorcelli & Rabinowitz, pp. 38–9). In 1964 she became the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre, and in 1975 was named an officer of the Légion d’honneur.
SIXTY FINE ITEMS
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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