BIELEFELD.- With the works of Sonia Delaunay (1885 – 1979) the Kunsthalle Bielefeld presents an unrivaled, all-round artist. Active in a number of fields such as painting, fabric design, typography, drawing, and fashion, her oeuvre is evidence of what was probably the most comprehensive will to create known to Classic Modern Art. Sonia Delaunay’s World of Art is the first large retrospective of her work in Germany in fifty years. The last time a survey of her work was seen was in 1958, at the Städtisches Kunsthaus in Bielefeld. Now, a key figure of Classic Modern Art is being rediscovered in Bielefeld. The exhibition, containing approximately 350 works, brings to life an artistic universe that anticipated today’s world of design. At the center of the show is the sensuality of color.

The diversity and range of her oeuvre—which includes painting, prints, fabric design, handcrafted objects, interior design, and a multiplicity of fashion, all the way to clothing accessories—has made Sonia Delaunay an exception among female artists of the twentieth century. In her indefatigable creative powers and the length of her career, which spanned almost seven decades, she can be compared to Picasso. With her all-encompassing ambition to give artistic form to life, including the everyday, and to firmly anchor art in people’s lives, Delaunay began a decade earlier to pursue ideas that were later also propagated by the Bauhaus in Germany in the nineteen-twenties. French art historian Bernard Dorival summed up her importance, which has not yet been duly understood, when he stated: “What a legion of Bauhaus artists meant to Germany, she herself alone meant to France.”

In memory of the special relationship between the history of the Bielefeld collection and exhibitions and Delaunay, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is devoting a comprehensive retrospective to the artist, fifty years after her first exhibition at Bielefeld’s Städtisches Kunsthaus. The groups of works by Delaunay acquired then will be organized according to their original groups, in order to provide an overview of the diversity and artistic range of her body of work.

Dressed in matching costumes of her own design, Delaunay and her husband regularly went to the Parisian dance hall known as the Bal Bullier, which she translated in her pictures into an abstract dance of colors, and it is here that the path to the world of glittering urban nightlife, the Variétés, and the dance opens up. This is also the theme of Tango Magic City (1913, Kunsthalle Bielefeld Collection) and Prismes Electriques, which impressively examine the dynamics and motion of colors and color forms.

Moving on from this complex of works, involving the study of color in simultaneity in the nineteen-tens, the exhibition also features her designs for fabrics and clothing from the nineteen-twenties, in which many of her sketches on the dynamics of color undergo a practical translation. Then there are the monumental, autonomous Color Rhythms, in their heavy settings, dating from the late nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Altogether, the show is a complete survey of this artist’s multifaceted oeuvre.

This project has been realized in cooperation with Delaunay’s estate and the most important museum collection of her work, the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, as well as a number of international museums and collections that have kindly loaned major works by the artist for the exhibition in Bielefeld.