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Abstract
This essay aims to understand and contextualize the Jewish identity of the artist Sonia Delaunay, who, in 1885, was born Sara Stern to a poor family in Gradizhsk, southeast of Kiev in Ukraine, well within the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian Empire permitted Jews to live. This essay argues that her early surroundings in Ukraine affected the formation of both her aesthetic and Jewish identity. From the age of seven, she grew up in St. Petersburg, in the home of her rich maternal uncle. Rather than looking for intentional Jewish content or motifs in her art, this essay attempts to tease out the ways that her life engaged Jewish culture—from the folk culture of her early childhood in Ukraine and her sophisticated adolescence in St. Petersburg, to art school in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the worlds of avant-garde art and haute couture in Paris. Any public acknowledgement of her Jewish identity was limited by her awareness and experience of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France. The bold self-image she projected as a modernist and as an outsider, coupled with her eager embrace of the new, reads as her individual response to traditional society's rejection of the Jews.
Acknowledgement
Research for this article and a projected book on this artist have received support from Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Such an ad reported from Jerusalem Post, presumably before 1967, when Aviva died. See http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/holy-chutzpah.
2. Nora Gallery opened in Jerusalem in 1942, founded by Nora Wlenska (1899–1980).
4. Due to the confusion produced by referring to Sonia and Robert Delaunay, as well as their son Charles, only by their last name, I will often refer to her as Sonia.
5. Some give her birthplace as Odessa, but scholars agree that she spent her early childhood in Gradizhsk.
6. I am accepting Jean-Claude Marcadé’s claim in the current Tate Catalogue that she went to live in St. Petersburg at the age of seven, not five, as is usually stated. See 19, note 3, for details on the archival evidence.
7. Schoenberg reclaimed his Jewish faith in 1933. In 1923, he famously accused Wassily Kandinsky of rejecting him because he was a Jew.
10. Buckberrough, 112, note 27, mentions this show and its review by Louis Vauxcelles, “Les Arts … .Broderie Russes,” Gil Blas (Paris), 26 July 1911, but states that the works included did not resemble Sonia's quilt.
11. Delaunay (Citation1978, 1): “Les souvenirs d'une petite fille qui vit dans les plaines de l'Ukraine restent des souvenirs de couleurs gaies.”
12. Sonia Delaunay began to correspond with Kandinsky through their mutual friend, Elisabeth Epstein, a Russian Jewish artist with whom she roomed upon first moving to Paris. Shevchenko (Citation1913 cited in Parton Citation1993, 77). See also Bowlt (Citation1974).
13. See http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Society_for_Jewish_Folk_Music on Rimsky-Korsakov. For an example of visual art a few years later, there is The Jewish Family of 1912, painted by the non-Jewish Russian artist, Natalia Goncharova, who painted this theme multiple times. See Kramer (Citation2002).
14. Bellow (Citation2001, 37) noted that many feminist art historians have remarked on the Delaunays’ “striking division of artistic labor,” but neither she nor her predecessors commented on the parallel that I see to life on the shtetl.
15. I take issue with Marcadé’s comment, 19, “In France, Sonia did not frequent Jewish circles, but she did stay in contact with her aunt's family, the Sacks, and with her Jewish friends.” Marcadé’s claim that Sonia did not recall in the 1970s that “her friend Barinoff-Rossiné was Jewish,” may reflect survivor's guilt since the cause of “his death had been his Jewish origins (at the time we did not know that he had been sent from Paris in 1944 on the last convoy to Auschwitz, where he died … ” 19, n. 8. Sonia seems to have responded differently to Jews such as myself and Alex Rosenberg than she did to Marcadé.
16. For Tzara. See Mansbach (Citation1998, 536) and Heyd (Citation2010, 193–219).
17. Sonia Delaunay to Evgeny Baranoff-Rossiné, 19 July 1971, Manuscripts Department of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, quoted in Susak, Ukranian Artists in Paris, 86.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gail Levin
Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at The Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York, is the acknowledged authority on the American painter Edward Hopper. She has also focused on the art of Jewish artists in historical context—from Aaron Copland to Mark Rothko. Her interest in women artists led to biographies of Judy Chicago (2007), Lee Krasner (2011), and a book and exhibition, Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art (2013–2014), featuring this forgotten supercentenarian (1890–2002). Levin's work has been recognized by grants from NEH, the Fulbright Association, Brandeis, Harvard, and Yale Universities, among others.