Sonia Delaunay — painter with roots in the Russian Empire
Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Stern on 14 November 1885, in Hradyzk (Gradizhsk), in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, according to the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and most recent research; Odessa is also given. She was the youngest of three children of poor Jewish parents; her father was a foreman at a nail factory. From about the age of five she was brought up, and later adopted, by her mother's brother, Henri Terk, a prosperous St Petersburg lawyer, and his wife Anna, and took the name Sonia Terk.
In St Petersburg she grew up in comfort and went to secondary school. In 1903 she was sent to study drawing in Karlsruhe, in Germany, and in 1905 moved to Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie de la Palette. A first marriage, to the German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, ended amicably in 1910, and that year she married the painter Robert Delaunay. Their son Charles was born in January 1911; the patchwork quilt she made for his cradle is now in the Centre Pompidou.
With Robert she developed Simultanism, also called Orphism, an abstract art built on contrasts of pure colour, and she carried it beyond painting into textiles, clothing and interiors. When the Revolution of 1917 ended the income from St Petersburg, she turned design into a business. During the war the couple lived partly in Spain, where she opened the Casa Sonia in Madrid; back in Paris in 1921, her Atelier Simultané produced fabrics, dresses and interiors for a fashionable clientele.
For the 1937 Paris International Exhibition the couple painted large murals for the air and railway pavilions. Robert died in 1941. During the Second World War she lived in Grasse with Jean Arp and Alberto Magnelli. In 1964, after she and her son donated 117 works by both Delaunays, the Louvre gave her a retrospective, the first for a living woman artist. She was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1964 and an officer in 1975, and published her memoirs, Nous irons jusqu'au soleil, in 1978. She died in Paris on 5 December 1979, aged ninety-four.
Tracing the roots — Hradyzk (Gradizhsk), Poltava Governorate (now Ukraine) — or Odessa; raised in St Petersburg
Born Sarah Stern in 1885 in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, she was brought up from about the age of five by her uncle Henri Terk, a wealthy St Petersburg lawyer, went to school in St Petersburg and left for art studies in Karlsruhe and Paris.
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Hradyzk (Gradizhsk), Poltava Governorate (now Ukraine) — or Odessa; raised in St Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.