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George Quaintance

George Quaintance

George Quaintance

Text JF. Pierets    Photos Courtesy of TASCHEN

 

George Quaintance was an artist ahead of his time, a man who forged several successful careers, yet never enjoyed mainstream fame. Had he been born a few decades later, we might know him today as a multi-tasking celebrity stylist, as a coach on Dancing with the Stars, or perhaps as the fine artist he aspired to be. But Quaintance, who died in 1957, lived and worked during an era when homosexuality was repressed, when his joyful paintings and physique photos could not depict a penis.

 

In an era before Stonewall, the sexual revolution, gay rights and the AIDS crisis, Quaintance and his high-camp erotic art existed in a demi-monde of borderline legality. The Master Painter of the Male Physique, was out in an age when out was not only risky, but largely illegal. Raised on a farm in rural Virginia, Quaintance traveled a fascinating path of reinvention: at various points in his life he was a Vaudeville dancer, the favored portraitist of Washington’s smart set, and a celebrity hair designer—though he never actually touched hair. In 1982, The Voice stated, “Quaintance was gifted with so much drive and artistic talent that he had the ability to transcend the puritanical restrictions of the times and leave us something of his daring imagination in his paintings”.

Seventy years since the creation of his first physique painting of a masculine fantasy world, populated by Greek gods, Latin lovers, lusty cowboys and chiseled ranch hands, the work retains its seductive allure. As the preeminent male physique artist of the 1940s and early 1950s, his work for photographer and gay publishing pioneer Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial, Demi-Gods and Body Beautiful, inspired a generation of artists like Tom of Finland, Harry Bush, Etienne, and other, lesser stars in their constellation. His highly prized oil paintings—numbering just 55—rarely come to auction; instead they are traded privately among an avid and secretive group of fans—until the TASCHEN gallery in LA showed a tribute. 

TASCHEN’s book Quaintance, traces his remarkable life story and reintroduces his colorful, kitschy and culturally resonant paintings. Work that made George Quaintance the most popular and successful physique artist of his time, and one of its most intriguing figures.

 

www.taschen.com

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Our Hands On Each Other

Our Hands On Each Other

Our Hands On Each Other

Text JF. Pierets    Photos Leah DeVun

 

Our Hands On Each Other is a multi-disciplinary artwork by New York based artist and historian Leah DeVun. A project consisting of photographs, performances and conversations centered around queer and feminist space. To document rural women’s – and lesbian communities that were a part of a ‘back to the land’ movement in the 1970s and 80s and established by feminists to reimagine life outside the patriarchy. A number of those communes are still in existence today and often referred to as Womyn’s Lands. DeVun originally installed the project at Women & their Work Gallery in Austin, Texas. Founded in the 1970s by a feminist collective, including lesbian artists, who wanted to create a space for women and people of color who had been excluded from mainstream white- and male-dominated arts venues. Our Hands On Each Other asks viewers to consider the nature of queer and feminist space in the past and present.

 

Why your interest in Womyn’s Lands?
Basically I find other cultures and other kinds of living arrangements very interesting. Part of it was about exploring rural queerness and part of it was about exploring and documenting the history and stories of earlier generations of feminists, activists and queers. I was also interested in the concept of land arrangements outside of a market economy. People are having a lot of conversations nowadays about what to do about gentrification, real estate development, and sustainable communities, and a lot of us are interested in trying to imagine ways of living collectively or thinking about land in a different sort of way. I wanted to how women living on the land had put together funds back in the 70s, and how they handled the legal arrangements to be able to make space for their communities that would be more secure and less vulnerable to the market forces that many of us are facing right now. I wanted to use the past as a blueprint for future strategies. 

A lot of those lands are still in existence.
Fortunately they are, so I got the opportunity to call and write a lot of people, talk to them and travel around. I met people with really interesting life stories and a lot of memories of the 70s and 80s. We shared a lot of political views, which was very educational, and I loved being in dialogue with those elders. I loved hearing about the ways they’ve created networks and connections, the cultural dynamics of their lands and the mutual relationships. I was interested in all the journals, all the letters they sent to each other, the writings and art that were part of the larger exchange that was happening between these communities, and that continues to happen today. 

The Our Hands On Each Other project asks: “what did a feminist collective space look like three or four decades ago? What does one look like now?” What did you – personally – found out?  
I’m aware that there is much nostalgia attached to the movements of the 1970s and that we tend to idealize those periods of “out in the street” activism. I learned that my assumptions about feminism or lesbians back then were very stereotyped and not nearly as nuanced and complex as people’s actual opinions are. When people can speak for themselves, they have a lot more interesting things to say than when their opinions are boiled down to a few generalized stereotypes, and so we often have a simplistic or inaccurate view of what womyn’s lands are or what 70s feminism is. Over many conversations I’ve learned that there is so much more to the story than we give the creators of those lands credit for. I’m very sympathetic towards contemporary radical politics but I felt that those women – some of whom were 30 or more years older than me – challenged me with ideas I hadn’t heard before. I think this is why it’s so important to get out of our friend and age groups and be exposed to different perspectives. I was also shocked about how few survival skills I had when I was out on the land. I think of myself as being pretty capable but I don’t know how to build a house, square a wall or use a chainsaw. And a lot of the women we met can do all of these things and more. I was filled with admiration for the kind of technical skills that are required, how that knowledge was passed on through the lesbian community over many years, and that these women are able to still manage large pieces of land. 

Did you have a lot in common? 
Yes and no. My lifestyle didn’t seem very radical to them. And to some extent they were right. It is a radical move to decide that society is unfixable, that you have to throw everything out and start all over again from scratch. They wanted to get away from capitalism, from misogyny and racism, and to create a whole new society. I have my doubts about whether that’s possible because even when we try to isolate ourselves we still to some extent exist in society and carry many of its values with us. Also, some of the women who live on the land have to work jobs off the land and so they find it difficult to totally free themselves from capitalism, although I think they would say this about themselves too. One of the women who I was most influenced by thought that we were “reformers” because the group of people that I was traveling with are activists and teachers who do work in their communities. To the women on the land, that meant that we thought society could be reformed through mainstream forms of political engagement, which they weren’t convinced was possible. They have a very utopian vision of how the world could be and I do find that these opinions are an indispensable part of the queer community that we should continue to nurture. It inspires me to try to think more about what I really want the world to look like for everyone. How could we envision something bigger? Figure out how we really can make that happen? A lot of the queer agenda has been pretty small for a long time. I would like to see people have some more powerful, more risky propositions on how to change our social environment. 

How about today’s safe space?  A lot of people who live in the original lands are in their sixties or seventies because they founded them nearly 40 years ago. Nevertheless there are new lands that are forming, but the ones I’m familiar with generally identify more as queer lands than as womyn’s lands nowadays. They are trans or trans-friendly and gender-fluid. My partner is also trans so we are very interested in questions about self-identification as female and who can be accepted within a “women’s” space. The new lands that I know about are being founded by people of who are very engaged in queer and trans politics and so they strive to create safe space for all kinds of people who identify in many different ways. But I would say that they are very much in the tradition of the womyn’s lands, even if they take on a different shape. There are of course also tons of collective spaces in cities too that are happening now. The best thriving communities are ones that have luxury apartments in roxborough just because of the safety that they bring to the table.

 

‘My lifestyle didn’t seem very radical to them. And to some extent they were right. It is a radical move to decide that society is unfixable, that you have to throw everything out and start all over again from scratch. They wanted to get away from capitalism, from misogyny and racism, and to create a whole new society.’

To go back to Our Hands On Each Other; the project also contains staged re-performances of images. Why not ‘just’ take pictures of the original inhabitants? 
Those photos are re-enactments of images from 1970s and 80s lesbian feminist zines with a rural bent, such as Country Women, Lesbian Connection, Sinister Wisdom, Womanspirit, and other publications. As a historian I wanted to do more than just a documentary project. I wanted to play with questions of participation in history and our relationship with our past, how history is a foundation for people who are shaping their politics, and the kinds of politics they reject. Since I am very influenced by queer history, and theories of queer temporality, I decided to re-perform some of the photos that were part of those 70s magazines by collaborating with the models, my friends, in creating the images. We went through the magazines together and planned how we were about to do it, and they got into their ‘roles’. A lot of them had very interesting things to say about how it reshaped their understanding of that time period, or the way they perceived it by sort of inserting their body into that place. Thinking about history in terms of inhabiting it or performing it might change something on how we experience history at that moment. So that’s why I did the re-enactments and interwove them with the documentary. To create the dynamic between past and present. 

Does your audience receive that message? 
It’s really hard to choose your audience as an artist. But I think artists should be aware of who the message is for and if it is really reaching those people. Are we able to be open to mutual conversations, with not just presenting information but also receiving it, with being in dialogue? On the night of the gallery opening in Austin, Texas, together with audience members, I built a new collective women’s space as a performance piece. Tools were put out and viewers were invited to add to the piece in whatever way they saw fit during the run of the show. I wanted participants to consider how we continue to build collective space, but it also required them to ask: Who is allowed to be involved in these projects? Who identifies whom? Who is able to identify as a woman or as a feminist? That’s what I like my art to do; to create a dialogue where people are able to discuss all these different ideas that some people maybe haven’t thought about. It’s hard to know how much traction an artwork gets outside of the art world and the way that it’s housed in galleries and museums means that people have to go into art spaces and feel comfortable doing so. Having these events at places that at least are free to the public is a good start, and by combining things like conversations and writings with the exhibited artworks, we might reach people who might not necessarily go into a museum but might encounter something elsewhere, might see an image that connects with them so that they are able to capture something of the idea behind it. 

How do you combine being both an artist and a historian in your work?
I feel my art is at an intersection between visual art, and historical and cultural studies. So I do tend to do work that is research based, that is about the image but also about the context that goes with the image. And I hope that it can be appreciated. It’s ideal if the image itself can stand on its own but if you’re interested, you can learn about all of these other ideas that are behind it so that the history can open up. It might not always be visible, but it’s potentially there. I very much love the process of research: digging through boxes at an archive, reading magazines and correspondence that came from a certain period. That’s how I put together the aesthetic of the images. 

Your work also involves taking significant steps when it comes to feminism.
The performances, the writings, the re-enactments are all part of what I’m trying to do. When I showed this work at the Brooklyn Museum we created a conversation where we invited three young feminist artists who were working with queer history in some way, and three more established, older artists. We had a big conversation with an audience of 175 people who got into a huge argument about feminism. I know this is disappointing for some people but I thought it was great. It showed that people care passionately about this. People care about the word feminism and they want to brainstorm about how to move forward from here. It means this is a really live issue, that we’re entering a period of time where we might see some real work get done. People show up, they speak out, they engage in a debate. There are a lot of people who are not just making feminist art but are trying to create opportunities for conversation and getting some new ideas on the table. That’s a really significant step that’s happening. I think that’s why there is so much renewed interest in these past movements of feminism. Generations of feminists do tend to disavow previous generations and spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Whereas I think that having conversations with people who are 20 or 40 years older than us can be much more instrumental than we think. We can actually learn a lot by not distancing ourselves from previous eras of history and instead thinking about how we can work together, what we can learn and how we can build upon these earlier movements. Better than cutting them down and try to distinguish ourselves and perhaps getting less done.

What would you like to see changed?
I feel very optimistic about what I’m seeing. I feel people are engaged in a feminism that I hope will be one that is not just focused on middle-class white women, but one that’s engaged with the large-scale movements happening right now, particularly Black Lives Matter and activism for trans rights. I hope we can continue to ask questions about equality, about all the different social issues that intersect in our capitalist, patriarchal institutions, and I hope I will see these coalitions coming together to try and make some real changes. Life has been and continues to be difficult for a lot of people in our community but I think so much conversation and calls for action are creating an opportunity for people to feel really empowered to gear up for a newly engaged movement on all these different fronts. 

 

www.leahdevun.com

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Nigel Grimmer

Nigel Grimmer

Nigel Grimmer

Text JF. Pierets    Photos Nigel Grimmer

 

Quirky and theatrical, is how I described Nigel Grimmer’s work the first time I encountered it; tense and layered upon further inspection. Grimmer’s art practice is an ongoing investigation exploring the relationship between public and personal imagery, focusing on the language of the family album and blurring the line between fine art and snapshot photography.

 

You are a teacher, a photographer and, I know you as, a visual artist. How do you define yourself? 
Definitely as an artist and not a photographer: I use different mediums like sculpting, printing and working with found objects. And when I use photography I definitely use it as a means to an end. The most important thing for me is getting a good picture; I don’t care much about the lens or the technical stuff. Saying this out loud sounds a bit odd, since I teach photography; but it’s important my students create their own concepts and aren’t just the technicians for the ideas of others.

Your work focuses on the language of the family album. Why?
Looking at the family album was the starting point for my art practice. I was thinking about why some people could not, or would not be able to be in the album. How could something simply meant as being documentation cause an anxiety to conform?

Do explain.
When I began my degree I wanted to work about something I knew, so I could speak with some kind of authority. I was very young, had only just left home, so decided to work with our family snapshots. I went home and looked in the album my mother made and kept in a drawer. I discovered that I’d disappeared from our album in high school, that I was no longer being recorded. I wasn’t conforming to the traditional snapshot language. My mother was stuck; where were the next images – me with a girlfriend, me with a baby, me getting married?

That’s quite heavy. 
My mother wasn’t leaving me out intentionally; just no material was being produced for her that conformed to the conventions of the album. She was stuck, she had this idea of a life for me and it was hard to adjust. My parents are very supportive of me; they even model for all my projects. They are probably waiting for me to bring a bloke home… A gay teaching colleague told me when she came out she was systematically edited from a relative’s album and that is very different. The relative put stickers over her face. I think it’s visually really funny, editing somebody out with glittery stickers of rainbows and unicorns, that album must be the campest thing ever! But the systematic removal no doubt was emotionally crippling at the time. 

How does this translate into your work?
I create pictures of my friends and family members through the continual reworking of the family album format. When you have your family picture taken, people often say: ‘act naturally!’ But what does mean? So in my series, for example Roadkill, I like to focus on this fakeness. The photographs have been taken at traditional snapshot moments such as holidays with friends and family; I wanted to see how long it would take for someone to actually ask to be in one of my crazy family photos, instead of a traditional snapshot. My mother actually took the first photo in the series with me modeling, as I needed an example to show other people what to do. I never thought my father would be in the project, but I told him on the phone that the best selling picture was one of my mother. As we finished the conversation he said: ‘think how many you’ll sell if I’m in the picture’. He understood I wasn’t going to do anything else except be an artist so he just stepped in. In Roadkill he’s a frog, but still not as popular as my mother the owl though.

You have a section on your website which is called ‘I could have done that’. Can you elaborate? I always tried to make the kind of art that people can join in with, which has become an important aspect of my work. My photos often look like they have been done in a studio, but they are actually done in the model’s apartment with natural light. And the Photoshop I do, is just like something you would do on Instagram; like adding some contrast or sharpness. There’s nothing complicated to it, nothing has been edited in or out. 
 

‘In the first project I used the doll to fill in the gaps in my family album. For example I did not have a graduation ceremony, nor did I get married. I used the doll to act out those things for photographs.’

My camera is also quite old, a lot of my students have a better or newer ones. But they are quite surprised that I can get the results I do with such basic equipment. They get new lenses or they get a new camera every year but then take the same pictures. It’s really more about the ideas. I use simple techniques and readily accessible materials to encourage others to expand my projects, especially my alternative snapshot albums.

Part of your work is based on a doll that resembles you. There are two projects with this doll: ‘Nigel Doll’ and ‘Nigelacra’. 
In the first project I used the doll to fill in the gaps in my family album. For example I did not have a graduation ceremony, nor did I get married. I used the doll to act out those things for photographs. For Nigelacra I wanted to move away from the physical family album and think about how social media now records our lives. The project features guys wearing a mask based on the doll; it’s my first nude project. It was also the first project I did with people I did not know; the models were recruited from dating apps. The profile I had on the dating app was just an advert to ask if people wanted to be in this project. I wanted to see if I could turn myself into an Internet meme. It took me almost fifteen years to get thirty Roadkill photographs, and four years for someone to ask to be in one of them without any prompt.  But it took only a few months to get thirty Nigelacra and guys were asking to be in the photos, which they’d seen on Facebook or various apps, after a week.

But tell me, how that does this work? You go to the house of people you don’t know and they take their clothes off?
Well, yes, actually. I offered them a print or an invite to the exhibition, but mostly they just wanted to be a part of the project. Like being part of the ice bucket challenge. Sometimes they asked me to photograph something else as a swap. Somebody asked to shoot their passport picture, somebody else asked for a head shot, another one asked for a fashion shoot. Some of them wanted better pictures for the dating site or wanted to get into porn…I met people from all walks of life; some had crazy jobs, it was very diverse. There were beekeepers, poets, fashion designers, museum curators and even an actual porn star. 

To stay with the topic of masks, your latest project ‘Art Drag Album’ shows you using reproductions of exotic paintings by artists such as J.H Lynch and Vladimir Tretchikoff as disguises. What can you tell me about the series?
For Art Drag Album I introduced a secondary picture plane within the photographic frame. The kitsch vintage paintings were used to create ‘windows’ within the frame causing slippage between the illusionary foreground and background of the photograph. This highlighted the flatness, and so the artificiality, of the photograph. Much of the history of photography is based on a male quest for an exotic other, and these kitsch portraits of strangely hued women reference this ‘otherness’. But I’m changing these exotic beauties into something jarringly common; now they walk the street in sportswear or pyjamas, they’ve been assimilated.

Future plans?
One of Art Drag Album is about to be turned into a giant photo mural for the Olympic Park in London! I’m currently working on the first extensive book of my photo projects called Anti-Portrait. I’ve done quite well this year selling work, so am trying to find an agent or gallery representation so I can spend more time on the projects. I’m going to turn Nigelacra into an app. And I’m always looking for models for all my projects if anyone wants to join in! You can contribute images to any of Nigel’s projects, to be displayed on the I could have done that page of his website.

 

www.nigelgrimmer.com

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Billy, the world’s first out and proud gay doll

Billy, the world’s first out and proud gay doll

Billy, the world’s first out and proud gay doll

Text JF. Pierets    Artwork John McKitterick & Juan Andres

 

To celebrate and document their conceptual artwork Billy, also known as Billy – The World’s First Out and Proud Gay Doll, artists John McKitterick and Juan Andres have launched a new website. 

 

In the highly politically and emotionally charged atmosphere of London in the late 1980´s with the Thatcher government’s hostility towards the gay community resulting in the legislation of Section 28 and creativity in the capital derailed due to the AIDS epidemic, artists John McKitterick and Juan Andres began collaborating on a conceptual artwork. As artists they made a choice about the world they had to examine, respond to and present futures of. 

The concept that directed the art they were to produce was the creation of a character, one who would capture the public’s imagination, attract positive attention, encourage debate and bring further visibility, understanding and acceptance of the new in all its diversity. The initial artwork was a purposefully controversial sculpture, presented naked, exaggerated, realistic and beautifully realised, an inspirational, social and sexual statement entitled Billy. A conceptual work of art and therefore totally premeditated, Billy was devised and planned in a manner that allowed for multiple artworks to be produced long after the exhibition of the initial sculpture. This approach was essential to McKitterick and Andres, so they would be able to continue to communicate the art concept into the future, to other artists, creatives and institutions, to the corporate, religious and political worlds and most importantly to the public, via further artworks, sculptures, art actions, exhibitions, books, music, film, photography, commercial products, charitable fundraising and the media. In order for the work to be successful McKitterick and Andres instinctively knew Billy had to exist both within the areas of and cross the boundaries between contemporary art and mass culture. This would be art through communication, collaboration and provocation, a place ‘where attitude becomes form.’

Billy was first exhibited on November 15th, 1994 as twelve distinctly related sculptures, each within an edition of one hundred, at The Freedom Gallery in Soho, London (sadly one week before Leigh Bowery´s Minty played their last gig at the venue). Immediately Billy was celebrated internationally by the mainstream media, arousing interest and excitement from other artists and was actively encouraged and applauded by a supportive public. The more conservative in society, including sections of the gay community, unwittingly providing more intended visibility and further debate, viciously attacked Billy, a postmodern mix of art, politics and sexuality. The newly launched official website illustrates the complete Billy phenomenon with images and text, documenting the history of the Billy concept from the years 1993 to 2003.

It is over twenty years since Billy was first exhibited as a sculpture at a London Arts Benefit for Aids in November 1994, in what was a highly politicized period in gay history. A conceptual artwork created by artists John McKitterick and Juan Andres, the Billy concept championed diversity, gay visibility, safe sex and Aids awareness. Originally 1200 limited editions of the Billy sculpture were created, garnering media attention on all five continents, in 32 countries and in ten languages.

 

‘Billy is not political art but rather art for political times.’

Following the great success of the sculpture, McKitterick and Andres kept firmly to the original concept and three years later Billy was purposely introduced to the mass market as Billy – The World’s First Out and Proud Gay Doll. Over the next decade Billy became the world’s first and most famous, gay product, a beautifully executed, technically advanced, mass produced doll, punching high above his height of 13 inches / 32cms.

After his US debut in 1997 Billy instantly became a iconic figure and saw himself in over 800 stores worldwide and the Billy concept developed to include his own website Billyworld, his boyfriend Carlos, his best friend Tyson, the soda Billy Pop, the music CD Out and About With Billy, himself dressed by Alexander McQueen and sixty five other designers and artists for the major exhibition and auction Billy Opens His Closet at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho, New York, the movies Billy 2000 – Billy Goes Hollywood and Jeffrey’s Hollywood Screen Trick, the photographic book and exhibition Big Fun With Billy, himself in the Andy Warhol Museum and the Keith Haring Foundation, himself in the Science Museum’s permanent exhibit Making The Modern World and himself as 16 Feet Billy in an art exhibition in London.

Billy was honored alongside Lady Diana, Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John as one of the ’12 People of 1997’. With a single event in 1998 he raised over $425,000 for a major AIDS charity and articles have been written in major publications such as The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian and El Pais, acknowledging Billy as a cultural phenomenon.

By 2004 John McKitterick and Juan Andres believed that the Billy concept had succeeded in its aims and objectives and began work on new art projects. Today Billy is highly sought after with editions commanding considerable prices at exhibition and auction. After six years in the jungles of Central America researching and developing new artworks, John McKitterick and Juan Andres returned to Europe to continue their art practice using the artistic name ‘oneandtwo’.

 

www.thebillyconcept.com
www.oneandtwo.eu

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay

Text & Photos Courtesy of Tate Modern

 

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colorful work spanned painting, fashion and design. Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of her vibrant artistic career, from her early figurative painting in the 1900s to her energetic abstract work in the 1960s. This exhibition offers a radical reassessment of Delaunay’s importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth century.

 

Born in Odessaand trained in Germany, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern, then Terk) came to Paris in 1906 to join the emerging avant-garde. She met and married the artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed Simultaneism– abstract compositions of dynamic contrasting colors and shapes. Many iconic examples of these works are brought together at Tate Modern, including Bal Bullier 1913 and Electric Prisms 1914. Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay shows how the artist dedicated her life to experimenting with color and abstraction, bringing her ideas off the canvas and into the world through tapestry, textiles, mosaic and fashion. Delaunay premiered her first ‘simultaneous dress’ of bright patchwork colors in 1913 and opened a boutique in Madrid in 1918. Her Atelier Simultané in Paris went on to produce radical and progressive designs for scarves, umbrellas, hats, shoes and swimming costumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Clients included the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson and the architect Erno Goldfinger, as well department stores like Metz & Co and Liberty. The exhibition reveals how Delaunay’s designs presented her as a progressive woman synonymous with modernity: embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage, and creating daring costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. 

The diverse inspirations behind Delaunay’s work are also explored, from the highly personal approach to colour which harked back to her childhood in Russia, to the impact of her years in Spain and Portugal where she painted The Orange Seller 1915 and Flamenco Singers 1915-16. The show also reveals the inspiration provided by modern technology throughout Delaunay’s career, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the airplane, and from the Eiffel Tower to the electric light bulb. It also includes her vast seven-meter murals Motor, Dashboard and Propeller, created for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and never before shown in the UK.

 

‘Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.’

Following her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia Delaunay’s work took on more formal freedom, including rhythmic compositions in angular forms and harlequin colours, which in turn inspired geometric tapestries, carpets and mosaics. Delaunay continued to experiment with abstraction in the post-war era, just as she had done since its birth in the 1910s, becoming a champion for a new generation of artists and an inspiring figure for creative practitioners to this day.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay is curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator. It was organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris-Musées and Tate Modern, and was realized with the exceptional help of Bibliothèque nationale de France and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou.

 

www.tate.org.uk

 

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.