| 1:8 Bugatti Delaunay |
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| This exclusive design was requested by a Bugatti enthusisast living in the UAE, Mohamed Kanoo, who wanted to re-animate interest in the successful marriage between art (Sonia Delaunay) and automobile (Bugatti)in what is undoubtedly one of the first 'Art Cars'. |
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In 1924 for an elegance contest, Sonia Delaunay famous painter, and fashion designer painted a Bugatti T35. She wanted to preserve the harmony of the woman and his car. |
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 Sonia Delaunay (1885 - 1979) |
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Was an artist in every sense of the word taking ideas from the realm of fine art and delivering them to the world of commercial design without losing her artistic integrity. Russian born, she studied at the Karlsruhe academy in Germany (1903-4), she moved to Paris in 1905, attending the Académie de la Palette there and married the painter Robert Delaunay in 1910, adopting at the same time his Fauvist style in her textiles. The adventure began in 1911. I had the idea of making, for my newborn son, a bed-cover made up of bits of fabric like the ones I has seen Russian peasants using. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material had a Cubist look to them, and we then tried to apply the process to other objects and to paintings. Sonia Delaunay and her husband were deeply involved with the most advanced art in Paris since before the First World War. Quickly adopting the lessons of Cubism from Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. Robert Delaunay produced paintings of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Saint-Severin Church and other motifs of the modern world such as the aeroplane and the motor car as well as designed sets for Ballets Russes. By the outbreak of the war he had distilled his art into pure abstraction, where fields of intense colour collided with one another. Developing a style that was called Orphism, sometimes also referred to as Organic Cubism, a movement that gave primacy to colour over form, he and Sonia were leading lights within the Orphists, a short lived Cubist splinter group based in Paris. Robert Delaunay's work in the figurative style that explored the effects of space, light and colour to achieve sharply contrasting imagery provided inspiration for much Art Deco design. |
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The sweeping circular curves and fields of intense colour could be easily adapted to almost any other medium. By 1910 fashion illustration and promotional graphics had undergone a dramatic change, and these commercial forms of image-making were becoming acceptable as legitimate art forms, attracting the skills and energies of artists such as Paul Iribe, George Barbier, Léon Bakst, Erté, Pablo Picasso, George Lepape, Etienne Drian and Sonia Delaunay who applied their skills to capture the very essence of the new design styles. It was however, Sonia Delaunay who really developed and used the possibilities of the Simultanist style to the full. She produced the first of her simultaneous clothing in 1913, and later in the decade created the first of her costumes for the Theatre. |
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With the words Atelier Simultané printed on the selvedge of the fabrics Sonia Delaunay produced for her shop in Paris of the same name, the painter-turned-designer showed her continuing allegiance to simultaneity or orphism, the avant-garde style of painting with geometrical shapes in pure colour oppositions that she pioneered with her husband Robert in painterly fashion, Delaunay prepared her patterns of squares, triangles, diamonds and stripes as gouache sketches, using very harsh colours contrasts - deep blue, bright red, black, white, yellow and green.
She then recast them into a number of different tonal combinations for printing. Affirming that she had undertaken a total revision in the values of textile art. A 1922 design for abstract dresses led to an invitation to work for a Lyons textile firm. Her design programme for clothing and accessories, La Boutique Simultanée, was widely acclaimed at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes where she shared a boutique with the couturier Jacques Heim. Photographs of Sonia Delaunay-Terk at the Exposition, show her in Simultanist dresses sitting on a gorgeous Bugatti T35 motor car painted in the same multicoloured simultaneous decoration. Her designs became all the rage, the look for the wealthy, sophisticated and avantgarde culture vulture. Sonia Delaunay as a textile designer, produced a diverse range of sharply Modernist and colourful fabric and rug patterns. As a measure of esteem in which she was held by her contemporaries, she was retained by the publisher Charle Moreau to author Tapis et Tissus, part of a series of volumes on 1920s decorative arts entitled L'Art International d'Aujourd'hui. Her simultaneous fabrics attracted both followers and imitators from the mid 1920s onwards, launching a vogue for contrasting colour schemes. Bright and pleasing to the eye, her style brought a refreshing change after the heavy, exotic palette made popular by Bakst and Erté costume designs for the Ballets Russes. The cut was also far more practical, severe and modern. She dressed silent screen star Gloria Swanson, Nancy Cunard of the Cunard Steamship Line fame, and the wife of Marcel Breuer (Hungarian Architect and designer who became the director of the Bauhaus furniture design department 1924. Best known for his tubular steel frame furniture with the bent solid beechwood seat and back with woven cane Chair B32 and Armchair B64 - and the even better known - Wassily Chair both of which were originally produced by Thonet and are currently produced today by Knoll International Inc, New York). She designed interiors with the Paris architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, her decorated scarves were known to have influenced the work of Paul Klee and Jean Cocteau wrote about her fashion designs. Between 1920 and 1930 Delaunay produced some of the most striking and original fabric designs of modern times. She continued to produce excellent work until her death in 1979. |
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