Plate 24, Compositions, Couleurs, Idées

This object is not part of the Cooper Hewitt's permanent collection. It was able to spend time at the museum on loan from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives as part of Making Design.

Sonia Delaunay is known primarily for her work as an abstract artist, but she used her strong sense of color and shape in a career as a designer of textiles, fashions, and costumes. Often using bold and contrasting colors in her designs, she also mixed strong colors with softer and more subtle colors. Delaunay numbered all her colors (coloris), and gave them her own names: the blues you see in this design are varying shades of what she referred to as faience, indigo, and nuit. Her career is said to have started when she decided to make her infant son a patchwork quilt for his crib. When all the fabric pieces came together, the effect was so hypnotic it inspired her to experiment further. She wrote: “He who knows how to appreciate colour relationships, the influence of one colour on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.”

This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibition Making Design.