© COPYRIGHT

by

Laura Ryan

2019

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SUBVERTING ORIENTALISM AND PRIMITIVISM?

SONIA DELAUNAY'S YELLOW NUDE, 1908

BY

Laura Ryan

ABSTRACT

In this thesis, I demonstrate that Yellow Nude includes a number of pointed references to historic stereotypes and contemporaneous tropes that embroil the artist’s identity in the primitivist ideologies she apparently appropriates. I first identify the background design within the painting as that of a turn of the century ikat textile, with Central Asian, Jewish, and Russian production histories that mimic the biographic transnationality of Delaunay herself. Delaunay therefore invites viewers to conflate the figure in the painting with the woman who made it, capitalizing on the perceived “exoticism” of her “primitive” cultural upbringing. From this perspective, the featured figure’s mask-like face, disjunctive body, and gender ambiguity further implicate, interrogate, and perhaps undermine international fascination with the “primitive.” I argue that in Yellow Nude Sonia Delaunay both recreated the popular type of the exotic foreign woman and subtly undercut the ideologies behind the genre through specific references likely legible to those who shared her background.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... iv

INTRODUCTION: THE VANGUARD NUDE, CIRCA 1908 ...... 1

PART I: FOREGROUNDING THE BACKGROUND: ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH

IDENTITY ...... 15

The Ikat ...... 17

Russian Culture, Jewish Labor ...... 20

Yellow as a Jewish Signifier ...... 25

PART II: THE MASK AND DISJUNCTIVE CONSTRUCTION ...... 31

The Mask ...... 35

The Disjunctive Body ...... 38

CONCLUSION ...... 47

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 49

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 52

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Sonia Delaunay, Yellow Nude, 1908, oil on canvas ...... 49

Figure 2: Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1907, oil on canvas ...... 49

Figure 3: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas ...... 49

Figure 4: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Nude Woman, 1904, drawing on paper ...... 49

Figure 5: Sonia Delaunay, Seated Nude, 1905, drawing on paper ...... 49

Figure 6: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Young Girl, 1905, drawing on paper ...... 49

Figure 7: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Young Girl, 1905, drawing on paper ...... 49

Figure 8: Sonia Delaunay, Cradle Cover, 1911, various textiles ...... 49

Figure 9: Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1912, limestone ...... 49

Figure 10: Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1913, oil on canvas ...... 49

Figure 11: Wall-hanging, probably Samarkand, third quarter 19th century ...... 49

Figure 12: Wall-hanging, probably Samarkand, third quarter 19th century ...... 50

Figure 13: Mikhail Larionov, Gypsy of Tiraspol, 1909, oil on canvas ...... 50

Figure 14: Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,

1897, oil on canvas ...... 50

Figure 15: Ikat detail, silk and cotton with glaze, before 1870 ...... 50

Figure 16: Man’s robe, silk and cotton, lined with printed cotton, after 1900 ...... 50

Figure 17: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 1879, oil on canvas ...... 50

Figure 18: Woman’s Munisak (shown inside out), late nineteenth-early twentieth century, adras ikat, lined with Russian printed cotton ...... 50

Figure 19: Michelangelo, Aminadab Lunette, 1512, fresco ...... 50

Figure 20: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906, oil on canvas ...... 50

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Figure 21: Fang Mask, Gabon, pre-1905, wood ...... 50

Figure 22: Maurice de Vlaminck, Reclining Nude, 1905, oil on canvas ...... 50

Figure 23: Pablo Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1907, oil on canvas ...... 51..

Figure 24: Tamara de Lempicka, La Bella Rafaela, 1927, oil on canvas ...... 51

Figure 25: Henri Matisse, La Coiffure, 1907, oil on canvas ...... 51

Figure 26: Marie-François Firmin-Girard, Toilette Japonaise, 1873, oil on canvas ...... 51

Figure 27: [Orientalist nude study], France, 1900. Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist

Photography Collection, 2008.R ...... 51

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INTRODUCTION: THE VANGUARD NUDE, CIRCA 1908

In 1908, Sonia Delaunay broke into the Parisian art world with a debut exhibition of oil paintings at the Galerie Notre-Dame-des-Champs.1 Run by Wilhelm Uhde, the gallery was located on the Left Bank of the Seine, just outside the bohemian neighborhood Montparnasse.

By virtue of its location, the venue offered Delaunay exposure to the avant-garde artistic circles that the Fauvist-inspired style of her works suggests she wished to join. Of the paintings she displayed in this exhibition, Yellow Nude (1908) stood out as the largest and most ambitious

(Fig. 1).2 This artwork served as a manifesto-like statement of Delaunay’s artistic vision, introducing herself and her creative intentions to the competitive Parisian art world of the moment.

As its title indicates, the canvas features a central female figure whose nude body commands the majority of the picture plane. Expressively colored with yellow skin and turquoise shadows, the pictured model reclines on her side, atop a floral pillow. She appears to gaze out at the viewer with a stiff, mask-like face that seems almost severed from her body by means of harshly delineated paint strokes. Behind her, a background of repeated, concentric diamond shapes contrasts with the form and color of the model’s body. In using the female nude as a ground for experimentation with the key elements of abstraction — such as non-naturalistic

1 I have chosen to call the artist “Delaunay” throughout this paper for clarity and to keep my work within the body of writing on “Sonia Delaunay.” At this point in her life, however, she was not Sonia Delaunay but Sonia Terk, as she had not yet married Robert Delaunay and taken his name. 2 Little documentation of the 1908 exhibition or Delaunay’s early working process is available to ground assertions about this early period. Delaunay left the majority of her early works unsigned and undated, sometimes returning to them later. In early catalogues, Yellow Nude is dated to 1907, later given as a range form 1907-1908, and currently dated by Delaunay scholars and the owning institution to 1908; The portion of the Delaunay archive housed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris includes letters written to the artist during these early years. Delaunay’s own letters and personal journals are archived at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) under copyright-restricted access. As of the publication date of this thesis, I have not received a response to my inquiry for access to the BNF archive from the copyright holder and have therefore been unable to compare these accounts to Delaunay’s own documentation of her work, if available. 1 color, figural distortion, and strong contour lines that deny volume — Delaunay asserted her understanding of recent trends in the avant-garde and implicitly claimed her readiness to join this circle of artists.

The few published interpretations of Yellow Nude compare Delaunay’s rendering to other primitivist nudes by canonical figures such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Ernst Ludwig

Kirchner.3 These scholars characterize the strong, dark outlines that define the central figure; the distortion of the female form; and the expressive yellow of her skin as borrowed from precedents by these famous male artists.4 More specifically, they compare her painting to Matisse’s Blue

Nude (1907) and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) (Figs. 2 and 3). They see

Delaunay’s work as a “stereotypical image of a prostitute” made to reference these earlier paintings.5 Such scholarship therefore suggests Delaunay’s inequality to her canonized peers, failing to recognize that her intentions in creating this image may go beyond mimicking the

“greats.”6 In my reading, Delaunay did not merely emulate these primitivist nudes, she also strategically responded to such precedents. Yellow Nude presents a sexualized “foreign” woman as well as visual references to the historic maltreatment and misrepresentation of the Other.7 The painting mobilizes Delaunay’s identity as a “foreign” woman — having come to Paris from

3 Few scholars discuss Yellow Nude beyond a passing reference. Two that do are Ann Hill Albritton and Brigitte Leal to whom I will come to in more detail in later. Ann Hill Albritton, “Sonia Delaunay-Terk: The Zenith Years, 1906-1914,” (Ph.D. Diss., City University of New York, 1997).; Brigitte Leal, “Nu jaune, 1908,” in Sonia Delaunay, 38-42 (London: Tate Publishing, 2014). 4 Aptly summarizing the extant scholarship, the Musée d'arts de Nantes (the owning institution) describes the painting as follows: “Cette figure jaune, allongée nue sur un tapis, emplit tout l'espace peint. Elle place le tableau entre le sujet érotique de la prostituée aux bas noirs et la pose classique du modèle d'atelier…Le visage aux traits accusés devient un masque. En 1908, Sonia Terk est à l'aube de sa carrière. Arrivée à Paris depuis deux ans, la jeune russe est marquée par le Fauvisme d'Henri Matisse, le Primitivisme de Paul Gauguin et l'Expressionnisme allemande..” “S. Delaunay: Nu jaune,” Musée d'arts de Nantes, https://museedartsdenantes.nantesmetropole.fr/home/au-cur-du-musee/les-collections/art-moderne/s-delaunay.html. 5 Leal, “Nu jaune,” 39. 6 Partha Mitter, “Introduction” and “The Formalist Prelude” in The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007): 1-27. 7 I use this term in both the philosophical sense of denoting all “others” that are not the “self” and with gendered and racial overlay given by its use in intersectional feminism. 2

Russia — and presents her as uniquely qualified to work in the genre. Such self-fashioning, however, necessitated a compromise: the painting appears to adopt unquestioningly stereotypes of ethnicity and gender that European ideologies imposed upon cultures deemed “Oriental” or

“primitive.” I argue, however, that the painting’s relationship to those ideologies is complex and ambivalent. Delaunay’s Yellow Nude simultaneously conforms to primitivist and Orientalist stereotypes and carefully counters those stereotypes, oscillating between affirmation and interrogation.

To substantiate this interpretation, I consider the ways Delaunay rendered three key, interrelated aspects of the painting: the figure’s mask-like face, which is tenuously connected to the rest of the figure; her androgynous body, which is arranged in a recumbent, Odalisque-like pose; and the brightly-colored textile in the background, keyed to the non-naturalistic hues of the figure in the foreground. In these three facets of the picture, I argue, Delaunay both recreated and undermined the gendered, national, and racial implications of early twentieth-century primitivism. I first identify the Orientalizing background design within the painting as that of a turn of the century ikat textile, associated at that time with specific Central Asian, Jewish, and

Russian production histories. Second, I analyze the racial and sexual connotations of the

“primitive” mask in relation to the nude’s eroticized yet androgynous body. I compare

Delaunay’s non-integration of the mask to her fracturing of the body through multiple, conflicting perspectival regimes. I relate both of these aspects to Delaunay’s identity as a

Russian-Jewish woman working in a male-dominated French context. I argue that that the majority of viewers at Galerie-Notre-Dame-des-Champs would see a standard primitivist nude; however, those who shared Delaunay’s cultural background would be most equipped to recognize the aspects of Yellow Nude that appear to subvert primitivism (and perhaps understand

3 them as doing so). I conclude that Delaunay fashioned herself as “primitive” while perhaps also undermining the main tenants of the genre. In taking on this style, she mobilized the markers of her difference as an argument supporting rather than negating her right to a place in the avant- garde.

It was a newly emigrated and evidently foreign Sonia Terk who set out to negotiate a place in the Parisian avant-garde with Yellow Nude.8 The artist, born Sarah Stern, spent her youth with her nuclear family in the Pale of Settlement in modern-day Ukraine, then within the control of Imperial Russia.9 Her financially challenged parents moved Sarah to St. Petersburg to live with her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, and his wife. The Terks’ affluence allowed Delaunay access to education, culture, and travel normally inaccessible to those of Jewish ethnicity before the 1917 Russian Revolution. These restrictions likely also spurred the change of Delaunay’s first name from Sarah to Sonia.10 The former is identifiably Hebrew in origin and the latter more typical for Russian women. 11 This change of name evidences both the prevalence of anti-

Semitism in Russia at the moment and the Terks’ desire to assimilate to the cultural norms of urban St. Petersburg. Similarly, Delaunay “assimilated” to the avant-garde when she arrived in

Paris by adopting a primitivist style that paradoxically brought her to foreground her

“foreignness” in her debut exhibition.

8 Like many immigrants coming to Montparnasse in the period, Delaunay lived and socialized with those of a shared cultural background. She lived with four other Russian women upon her arrival in Paris and the women chaperoned each other to galleries in the area. Delaunay’s nationality was therefore made more evident by her social circle in Paris. See Arthur A. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1975), 39. 9 This paragraph of biography repeats widely reported facts of the artist’s life. The following list of sources include helpful biographies and aided me in my summary: Albritton, “The Zenith Years.”; Sonia Delaunay, (London: Tate Publishing, 2014).; Sherry A. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective, (Buffalo, N.Y: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1980); Cohen, Sonia Delaunay. 10 She did not, however, legally change her name; Sarah Stern was listed as her name on both her marriage license to Uhde and on her tombstone. See, Albritton, “The Zenith Years.”; Axel Madsen, Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 16. 11 Gail Levin, “Threading Jewish Identity,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15, no. 1 (2016): 88-108, 91.; The surname “Terk” was not identifiably Jewish on its own, thus a first name change alone allowed the artist to more easily assimilate. 4

The artist formally trained in the arts with private tutors and at arts academies, moving toward more radical styles. She studied first with private tutors in St. Petersburg and then at the

Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany, where she spent two years learning the academic style.12 In 1905, she briefly enrolled again in formal education at the Académie de La Palette in

Montparnasse, through which she met many influential painters working in Paris. However, she soon left to pursue her own career through an expressive painting style inspired by the Fauve and

Gauguin exhibitions then on display at avant-garde venues in the city.13

In 1908, German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde facilitated Delaunay’s bid to join the Parisian avant-garde by hosting her debut exhibition. In December 1908, forestalling family pressure to return to Russia, the artist entered into a mariage blanc with Uhde, who in turn sought cover for his homosexuality. From November 1908 to January 1909, Uhde exhibited Delaunay alongside

Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger, Jules Pascin, and Pablo Picasso, helping establish her avant-garde credentials.14 The union afforded Delaunay a level of privilege and access that would otherwise have been difficult for a woman and newcomer to the community to obtain. As was also the case with her later marriage to Robert Delaunay, her relationship with Uhde was advantageous to her career, even as it defined her in relation to her male partner — a paradox common to the careers of many early twentieth-century female artists.15

12 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 237. 13 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 237 14 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 56.; Many sources call this exhibition of Delaunay’s a solo exhibition. Albritton counters and accounts for this change in her dissertation. See Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 31.; Uhde was well connected with both other dealers and artists within Paris; he introduced Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to Pablo Picasso in 1907 after seeing the in-progress Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the artist’s studio, a privilege afforded to few at the time. See Enrique Mallen, “Reaching for Success: Picasso’s Rise in the Market (The First Two Decades),” Arts 6, no. 2 (2017). 15 Anne Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): modernism and the art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1996. 5

In examining Yellow Nude, I am calling attention to a relatively underexamined period in the artist’s career — the time before her 1910 marriage to Robert Delaunay, with whom she later developed the colorful, geometric style they termed Simultanism (dubbed Orphism by

Guillaume Apollinaire). The majority of the literature on the artist considers only this period of collaboration with her husband, discounting the work she made before they met and after he died in 1941. This is, in large part, due to the scholarly tendency to consider the “height” of an artist’s oeuvre as their “true” style. Delaunay’s paintings also have received less attention than her work in the applied arts of costume, textile, and graphic design. This follows the gender division in the Delaunays’ joint practice: Robert Delaunay typically is framed as the painter of the duo, whereas Sonia Delaunay is considered an applied artist. My work with Yellow Nude recalls attention to the fact that Sonia Delaunay began her career as a painter, and continued painting well into her Simultanist years.

Yellow Nude and its preparatory sketches indicate Delaunay’s early professional ambition and strategies for navigating the Parisian avant-garde before she met and married Robert

Delaunay. Her earlier works from this period largely appear to be portrait paintings made from observation. For Yellow Nude, however, it appears she transformed sketches drawn from a model into a non-specific, full-figured nude, far more akin to the working practice of other

Parisian avant-garde artists. Most contemporary catalogues portray Study of a Nude Woman

(1904) as the sketch for Yellow Nude, with the similarity of the dark stockings easily connecting them (Fig. 4).16 However, formal similarities between the body of the figure in Yellow Nude and those in an earlier series of studies suggest that these drawings were instead more direct reference material for the painting (Fig. 5, 6, and 7). In all three sketches, a female nude with a

16 See Leal, “Nu jaune,” 40.; See Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, 131. 6 flat chest and protuberant stomach reclines along ground lines that may depict pillows. These sketches of the nude form and others like them by Delaunay have conflicting dates across sources, ranging from 1905 to 1909. The majority of sources date the studies to Delaunay’s first years in Paris, perhaps drawing on the fact that she likely had access to models at Académie de

La Palette. Early dates seem most plausible and, if accurate, mean Delaunay used old sketches to make a new painting in 1908: Yellow Nude. Delaunay, therefore, transformed the figure from a seated position, as in the sketches, to reclining, and added the textile background, which did not appear in any surviving preparatory drawing. By adding this “Oriental” or “harem” textile into

Yellow Nude, Delaunay also appropriated the subject of many primitivist paintings: the “foreign” or non-Western European woman.17 This choice aligned Delaunay with other vanguard artists who were establishing themselves in Paris by portraying figures representing “primitive” or foreign cultures, including Matisse and Picasso.

However, Delaunay’s gender and ethnicity complicated her participation in the primitivist movement. Primitivism is premised upon the assumption that non-European people live unconstrained by European rules of social and sexual propriety. This follows the imperialist notion that non-Europeans were not as modern and less “civilized” than European countries — a belief often used as a justification for European colonialism in those regions. This ideology also not only feminized “primitive” cultures, but also associated women and “primitive” peoples with heightened emotions; with sensory experience; and with nature. As the “crisis of modernity” spurred disillusionment and dissatisfaction with modern life, many Europeans looked to the

“less-evolved” Other (female and/or foreign) for a better way of life.18 Yet this framing, in turn, implied a lack of higher-order cognition, and placed both groups outside of the intellectual

17 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 93.; Leal, “Nu jaune,” 39. 18 Paul Gauguin’s paintings and writings from Tahiti crystalized this notion and propagated it in Paris. 7 capacity of the white European male. So while many avant-garde painters sought to depict the supposedly universal perspective of the “primitive,” most also held privileges that allowed them to work fluidly between the naiveté of their embodied primitive identity and the perceived intellectualism afforded to white men. French writer Roland Dorgelès succinctly captured this idea when he named Matisse “the prince of the Fauves” in 1910, citing his ability to “paint like a

Negro while speaking like a wise man.”19

As a woman and a foreigner, Delaunay could not as easily move between “primitive” and

“civilized” artistic personae. She seems to have been aware that her identity cast her in both senses as “primitive.” Indeed, she encouraged this perception. In her autobiography, for example, she described herself as emotive and unthinking, guided by the feeling of color rather than theory. Similarly, in an interview about her work, she called her practice “spontaneous,” rejecting the idea that she looked to artistic precedent or theory, responding, “too sophisticated.

I'm closer to nature and to life. I was searching for something within myself and little by little it became abstract painting.”20 She claimed that her work held the “light of the Orient,” and that her colorful palette derived from her Russian-Ukrainian upbringing.21 But this is a conscious misrepresentation of her background. Delaunay had been extensively educated in Russia, where

19 With this statement, Dorgelès also marks the categories of “Negro” and “wise” as mutually exclusive, reiterating the lack of privilege afforded to those of racial “difference.” Roland Dorgelès, “Le Prince de Fauves,” Fantasio, 105 (1 Dec. 1910): 299-300., quoted in translation in Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 163. 20 In this interview, given late in her life, Delaunay repeatedly refuses comparison and categorization. She dismisses the idea that she made calculated work and also places her practice above those of more “intellectual” male artists. She states, “I'm an artist. For a long time I didn't even know what I was doing. I just had a need to express something.” Her interviewer then asks, “But your husband knew what he was doing. He theorized everything.” Delaunay responds, “Yes. He talked, but I realized.” This interview conveys some of the deep complexities of Delaunay’s presented identity; she dismisses notions that would seem to “elevate” her status to that of these male comparisons while maintaining that her work is, in fact, on par with, if not above, such precedents precisely because it is “spontaneous.”; David Seidner and Sonia Delaunay. "Sonia Delaunay." BOMB 1, no. 2 (1982): 18-66. 21 For a summary and refutation of this “naïve” self-fashioning, see Larry Silver, Freyda Spira, Juliet Bellow, and Arthur Ross Gallery, eds, Transformation: Jews and Modernity, (Philadelphia, PA: Distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 37. 8 she read the works of famous philosophers in their original language.22 Thus Delaunay’s presumed identity was a form of self-fashioning that leans into negative associations of race and gender, despite the apparent defamation of her ability. By taking on a “primitive” persona,

Delaunay labeled herself especially qualified to make primitivist paintings, gaining access to the avant-garde. However, in doing so, she also labeled herself as uncalculating, unintelligent, and apparently less-than her male colleagues.

Yellow Nude manifests this approach through equally stark “foreign” associations as those of Delaunay herself. The textile foregrounds the artist’s “Oriental” upbringing within a largely French-inspired genre and style. The female figure invites conflation of the depicted

“exotic” woman with the artist herself. The image’s iconography mirrors the hybridity and transnationality of the artist’s own cultural background, manifesting her “primitiveness” while undercutting such stereotypes to those who could recognize the Russian-Jewish origins of the painting’s referents.

My interpretation of Yellow Nude builds on recent scholarship that considers Delaunay’s strategic use of her Russian-Jewish heritage as central to understanding her work. In early assessments of her career, scholars tended not to question Delaunay’s assertion that her art was instinctual or naïve. They accepted her self-fashioning at face value, rather than seeing it as a careful marketing of her identity to an art world fascinated by the foreign and the exotic. Jacques

Damase’s Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colors solidified this perspective in 1972, before the artist’s death.23 Damase — who, incidentally, owned and sold Yellow Nude to the Musée des

22 Delaunay was fluent in Yiddish, Russian, German, French, and English by the time she moved to Paris. Jean- Claude Marcadé describes her experience reading philosophy in its original language and Levin clarifies that Delaunay also knew Yiddish as well as the other languages often referenced in scholarship.; See Jean-Claude Marcadé, “In St Petersburg,” in Sonia Delaunay, (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 20.; Levin, “Threading Jewish Identity,” 91. 23 Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay Rhythms and Colors, (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1972) 9

Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 1987 — had a friendly relationship with the artist and repeated both

Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s descriptions of the artist’s intentions throughout his monograph.

Axel Madsen’s 1989 book on Delaunay continues the theme, writing from a first-person perspective and creating a sense of familial intimacy in his description of the life of the artist.

These analyses accepted Delaunay’s claim that her art was merely instinctual and uncalculating.

Starting in the late-1970s, however, scholars began to recognize that Delaunay’s statements constituted strategies designed to help her navigate the Parisian art world. Unlike

Damase, Arthur A. Cohen and Sherry Buckberrough maintained greater scholarly distance from the artist and interpreted her oeuvre more objectively. Cohen countered Robert Delaunay’s description of Sonia Delaunay’s use of color as “atavistic” due to her Russian heritage and their specific folk craft tradition. Cohen argued this “flattering racialism” could apply to an array of cultures.24 Buckberrough similarly analyzed the multi-nationalism of Delaunay’s fashion designs to demonstrate the ways the artist framed her “foreignness” to her advantage.25 In 1997,

Ann Hill Albritton published an equally careful study of Delaunay’s early works.26 It countered many of the artist’s own statements about the intentionality of her artistic choices and challenged her narrative of her move to Paris through documentary evidence.27

The emergence of feminist art history in the 1970s and ’80s, and intersectional feminism in the 1990s, were partly the impetus for these reassessments of Delaunay’s career. Whitney

Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron dedicated a chapter of their book about artist couples to the

24 Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, 40. 25 Sherry Buckberrough, “Delaunay Design: Aesthetics, Immigration, and the New Woman,” Art Journal 54, no. 1 (1995): 51–55. 26 Albritton’s dissertation focuses exclusively on Delaunay’s early career. I am grateful and indebted to Dr. Albritton for her thorough attention to these underserved years in Delaunay’s career and I cite her research throughout this thesis. 27 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 56. 10

Delaunays. 28 They argue the Delaunays, like many artistic partners, had a mutual influence upon each other’s work. This analysis returned agency to Sonia Delaunay’s part in their collaboration. Such interpretations also work against the diminutive “wife of” designation pervasive in previous literature on Delaunay and many female halves of artist couples. Building on this new understanding of the Delaunays’ relationship, in the 1990s and 2000s Buckberrough,

Tag Gronberg, and Juliet Bellow revisited Delaunay’s work in the applied arts, creating a more accurate picture of the artist and securing the autonomy of her vision.29 Earlier scholars framed

Delaunay’s commercial success in fashion and textile design as motivated by financial need, done to support Robert Delaunay’s career, and therefore less creative, innovative, and “pure” than oil painting.30 These essays reframe Delaunay’s success in textile and fashion design as not only a mark of her skill as an artist, but also relate her ability to join the spheres of “art” and

“life” with the broader goals of the early twentieth-century avant-garde.

My identification of the background of Yellow Nude as an ikat textile shows that

Delaunay’s interest in combining painterly abstraction with experimentation in textiles predates the work usually thought of as her first foray into textile design — the blanket she made for her son Charles (Fig. 8). By revealing Delaunay’s early interest in fabric design, I re-contextualize what scholars consider an abrupt change in her practice from oils to cloth. The interpretation provided here thus dispels the reductive notion that Delaunay turned to fabrics simply out of a

28Whitney Chadwick, “Living Simultaneously: Sonia and Robert Delaunay,” in Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership, eds. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993); This shift is likely in response to early texts that leave out Sonia Delaunay in discussion of Robert Delaunay’s Orphism, like Virginia Spate’s 1979 book on the topic.; Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-1914, Oxford Studies in the History of Art and Architecture (Oxford: New York: Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1979). 29 Tag Gronberg, “Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman,” Women: A Cultural Review 13, no. 3 (November 1, 2002): 272–88.; Buckberrough, “Delaunay Design,”; Juliet Bellow, “Fashioning Cléopâtre: Sonia Delaunay’s New Woman,” Art Journal 68, no. 2 (2009): 6–25. 30 Clare Rendell, “Sonia Delaunay and the Expanding Definition of Art,” Woman’s Art Journal 4, no. 1 (1983): 35– 38. 11 motherly instinct, arising after the birth of her first child. Yellow Nude demonstrates that

Delaunay early on connected primitivist abstraction with brightly-colored fabric. The painting also reveals that Delaunay recognized and responded to perceptions of her identity from the very beginning of her career.

By using aspects of her cultural background as source material, Delaunay both capitalized on her apparent closeness to the “primitive” and subtly undermined the association of

“primitive” cultures with timelessness and authenticity. Unlike many of her peers in the Parisian art world, and much of her French audience, Delaunay had experienced life in the “non-modern” arena of a “primitive” culture during her upbringing in a Ukrainian shtetl. Because she “self- primitivizes,” Delaunay works from a dual space, both as the exploited and exploiter. Thus, she likely had a very different relationship to the genre and its view of foreign women because of her lived experience. She may have understood the images to be exaggerations or inventions of an

“exotic” female archetype. She may have even included subtle critique of the genre in her work because of her “insider” perspective, uncommon among the Parisian avant-garde artists.

Post-colonial art history revealed the way European images of non-European peoples were ideologically-motivated, and therefore misrepresentations of those individuals. With knowledge of the realities of non-European life, Delaunay’s primitivism may allude to the misrepresentations within the genre. The “African” mask the Fauves used as evidence of

“primitive” African aesthetics actually depicted, unbeknownst to them, a colonizer.31 It was likely crafted to be sold to the French and therefore was as modern and contemporary as French art from the same year. As Delaunay lived within the supposedly “primitive” cultural space of provincial Imperial Russia, within the Pale, she experienced the contemporaneity of these places

31 Joshua I. Cohen, “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern ‘Primitivist’ Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 136–65. 12 and their actual interaction with, rather than seclusion from, modern global cultural exchange.

This likely gave Delaunay the perspective to see the falsehood of primitivism’s basic tenets and embed allusions to fantasy of primitivism within her primitive painting.

Delaunay’s decision to “self-primitivize” was not isolated: she drew upon a strategy adopted by other immigrant artists living and working in Montparnasse at that time. This bohemian neighborhood was a haven for artists emigrating from Germany, Russia, Poland, and other areas of Europe, with a particularly concentrated Jewish population.32 This included figures such as Amedeo Modigliani and Marc Chagall who, like Delaunay, foregrounded their outsider identities to “brand” themselves as Other to the Parisian public. Modigliani’s Head of a

Woman (1912), for example, employs the stylistic traits of African masks that were available in

Paris to forge a connection between his Italian-Jewish heritage, and the purportedly “primitive” cultures of the African continent (Fig. 9). Chagall likewise painted a whimsical image of life in the Russian Pale of Settlement to capitalize on his difference, foregrounding his Jewishness and apparent “folk” identity as his edge in the Parisian market (Fig. 10). Here, both artists took advantage of the way primitivism imagines an inherent and unchanging link between an artist and his or her culture of origin. In Montparnasse, the busy, quasi-studio apartment space of La

Ruche attracted many immigrant artists. They often worked and lived alongside other immigrants from their home countries, socializing at the many cultural enclave cafes in the neighborhood. Thus, these artists had two audiences: members of the avant-garde who would accept the primitivism of their art, and those who were more likely to understand or even relate to the fictiveness of their self-presentation. Like these examples, Delaunay’s painting spoke both to visitors unfamiliar with Russian iconography as a basic, primitivist nude, and to Russian and

32 Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945 (New York: Universe Books, 1985). 13

Jewish viewers who were more likely to be equipped to recognize and decode its more complex meanings as a subversion of the genre.

14

PART I: FOREGROUNDING THE BACKGROUND: ORIENTALISM AND JEWISH IDENTITY

In the background of Yellow Nude, patches of darker purples and lighter oranges come together to create a roughly worked mauve ground. The pattern is most visible at the far left of the canvas where the lines of the shape, partially covered by the figure’s legs, appear to form three inset diamonds. Scumbled lines of dark teal outline the pattern, joining it with the ground color to create a clearly cohesive and flat surface. The diamonds cut in and out of each other in a chevron pattern, moving from teal to orange to a green-brown color in the center, all outlined by thin stripes of navy. Down the center of the canvas, the shapes repeat, though now extending off the edge of the painting, leaving only triangles of the pattern for the viewer. A sole strip of teal runs vertically down the painting near the right edge, not conforming to the pattern, while an uninterrupted section of ground color runs across the bottom edge of the work. The overall effect is of an offset, woven fabric design pressed flat against the picture plane.

This pattern closely recalls the typical style of a Central Asian ikat textile. The majority of Central Asian ikats also feature repeated, jagged, inset diamond shapes. These silk and cotton ikat wall hangings popularized in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. They were collected by European travelers and exported to Russia. One example, probably made in

Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan), features a red ground with uneven rows of concentric, jagged diamonds (Fig. 11). Another, produced around the same time as Yellow Nude portrays a similar though enlarged and simplified design (Fig. 12). Delaunay’s design conforms to this type of the modern ikat.

The few scholars who mention that the painting’s background resembles a textile do not investigate further. One calls it “an Oriental, Turkish, or even Native American rug,” while

15 another simply deems it “multicolored harem décor.”33 These descriptions denote only the fabric’s foreignness and apparent Orientalism without the nuance of cultural or regional specificity. With experience living in rural Ukraine, which Europeans generally viewed as vastly distant and different, Delaunay likely understood the textile as a product of modernity rather than

“primitivism.” The ikat textile in Yellow Nude, which seems to conjure the ancient space of the

“Orient,” is actually a contemporaneous fabric, as modern and culturally hybrid as the painting itself. The textile is also indicative of anti-Semitism, suggesting Delaunay includes this specific fabric to comment on the historic, troubled treatment of the Other — “Eastern,” or Jewish — and the subsequent stereotypes that followed.

Delaunay’s use of the ikat textile, with its multiple relations to “the Orient,” paralleled efforts by other early twentieth-century artists of Russian origin to affiliate with both “Eastern” and “Western” identities. As Sarah Warren notes, Mikhail Larionov’s Neo-Primitive female nudes of 1909-12 capitalized upon the slippage between the identities of “Westernized”

Moscow, where he lived at that time, and the “primitive,” and “Eastern” town of Tiraspol where he was born and took many of his subjects.34 Warren compares Larionov’s Gypsy of Tiraspol

(1909) with Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897) to underscore crucial differences between Russian and European primitivism (Figs. 13 and 14).

33The full sentence reads, “situated on the patterned background of an Oriental, Turkish, or even Native American rug, the stark nude, painted with yellow flesh, is a portrayal of a young prostitute wearing long black stockings.” Albritton’s steeps Delaunay’s early paintings of women in feminist theory, laying out the transgressive and savvy statements made by Delaunay and other female “primitive” artists on canvases of women like mother-and-child paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker and self-portraits by Gabriele Münter. With this focus, she does not return to the background. Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 93.; The full sentence reads, “her golden skin and the multicolored harem décor invest her with a sense of gratuitous eroticism, which is probably indebted to Gauguin’s great Tahitian nudes, but stripped of any sensuality.” Again, her narrow focus excludes the background from large considerations as she is comparing Yellow Nude to other contemporaneous avant-garde paintings of the female nude made by men. Leal, “Nu jaune,” 39. 34Sarah Warren, “Spent Gypsies and Fallen Venuses: Mikhail Larionov’s Modernist Primitivism,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 27–44. 16

These differences stem from each country’s geographic relation to its “primitive” colonies:

France’s colonies were located outside the nation’s borders, whereas Russia annexed contiguous lands inhabited by more culturally and racially similar peoples. Larionov therefore positioned himself as both “civilized” Muscovite and “primitive” in origin.

Delaunay’s references to her Russian identity are similar in Yellow Nude. Like Larionov, she plays on Russia’s identity as both “Eastern” and “Western.” While Larionov does so to create a specifically Russian modernism, Delaunay frames her transnationality as advantageous to the aims of French modernism.35 She affiliates herself with the “Oriental” connotations of the ikat textile while also stressing its stylistic similarities with the primitivist abstraction practiced by members of the Parisian avant-garde.

The Ikat

The jagged edges of the diamond shapes in Delaunay’s background textile refer to the distinctive, intricate resist-dyeing method used to color ikat fabric.36 The traditional process includes several repetitions of wrapping and dyeing threads to create a pattern that is secured through weaving only after the dye application of every color. To begin, a craftsperson first makes silk and then strings the spun threads onto a wooden frame. These vertical threads are

35 Larionov and other Russian modernists in his circle, founded the Jack (or Knave) of Diamonds exhibition society in 1910 to promote artistic advancement in Moscow. In the two years between its first and second exhibition, Larionov and Russian artist Natalia Goncharova further removed themselves from European exhibitions. In 1911 they formed The Donkey’s Tail exhibition group which distanced itself from Parisian art, both in name and practice, in favor of traditional Russian subjects; Larionov named the group to mock French painting produced by the swishing of a donkey’s tail. They sought to created space for Russian cultural production outside of the French venues, creating as Warren evidences, a distinct style outside of European primitivism (despite the pairs later move to France). For an overview of this and the following history of Larionov’s Russian exhibition endeavors, see Sarah Warren, Mikhail Larionov and The Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013). 36 This process is similarly recounted amongst textile sources. I have drawn most from the technical explanation of the process given by Ruby Clark and the various following sources which explain the process; Ruby Clark, Central Asian Ikats: From the Rau Collection, (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 10-13.; Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: The Guido Goldman Collection, (London: Laurence King, 1999), 14-17.; Jack Lenor Larsen and Bob Hanson, eds., The Dyer’s Art: Ikat, Batik, Plangi, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 12-27. 17 known as the warp of the textile; the vast majority of ikats are warp ikats in which only these threads are dyed. The weaver then sketches the desired pattern directly onto the warp, and wraps the sections of the silk in tightly-wound cotton. These covered bundles of thread will therefore not be stained by the first dye bath and will preserve the original color of the fabric from the applied color. The wound wrappings are often sealed with wax to prevent seepage. The maker must then wait for the dye to dry, remove the wrappings, and repeat the process for each additional color. Finally, a loom is used to weave the horizonal weft threads between the dyed strands of silk. The weft is generally of a finer thread than the warp, ensuring it will not disrupt the design as it binds the cloth. Often, the craftsperson will repeatedly hit the finished silk to help it shine, sometimes adding a finishing solution to enhance the effect. The method is a labor intensive and expensive process of textile production, and both of these factors increase with the intricacy of the design.

Ikat textiles have characteristic bleeding between colors, creating hazy edges along design shapes that varies their border from thread to thread and section to section. The resist method is not “perfect,” and dyes often seep into the wrapped sections. It is precisely this characteristic of the ikat that Delaunay captures in her painting. Traditionally dyed ikats, made before 1870, feature such blurring between colors that it appears pixelated to the 21st-century viewer (Fig. 15). Thus, the jagged edges in ikat designs are a product of this particular process and a clear identifier of the type. In contrast to the tightly outlined figure, the background pattern of Yellow Nude appears to bleed teal into the mauve ground, cementing the identification of the fabric beyond the geometric design and seemingly alluding to the technique itself.

Indeed, the abstracted quality of Delaunay’s painted textile may in fact refer to the reduced intricacy of pattern and palette characteristic of late nineteenth-century ikats, made in

18 response to a heightened demand for the fabrics. The ikat mentioned above (Fig. 15) boasts vivid gold, maroon, and green set within darker purple outlines on a green ground, with alternating white and blue featured insets. The design curls in and out of itself in a complex manner that would require a vast number of small wrappings to achieve. By contrast, ikats produced after the turn of the century often had only a few colors in simplified designs. An example of a man’s robe made after 1900 exemplifies the change as the pattern is large, simplistic, and comprised of a relatively small number of colors applied in large zig-zag stripes

(Fig. 16). Delaunay’s pattern clearly evokes the simplicity of such later designs.

This raises the question: how much did Delaunay or viewers who came to Galerie-Notre-

Dame-des-Champs know about the type of ikat she chose to paint? During the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire increasingly imported ikat textiles and expanded into the less industrialized Central Asian territories producing them.37 Russian viewers would therefore likely recognize in the jagged, inset shapes that pattern the background of Delaunay’s painting the distinctive concentric diamond designs of turn-of-the-century ikats and know something of the ikat’s Central Asian origins. Viewers unaware of these circumstances — likely most visitors to her exhibition — would probably take the textile as an “authentic,” timeless, “Oriental” artifact.

However, viewers acquainted with the particular type of textile could see it quite differently — as a modern artifact made in response to market pressure.

Delaunay’s version of the ikat thus allows her painting both to participate in a tradition of

European Orientalist painting and to subtly complicate that tradition. The textile recalls the

“Oriental” connotations of geometric patterning to those familiar with the “Western” canon. For example, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1870) uses the tight mosaic patterning of the

37 Fitz Gibbon and Hale, “Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia,” 14. 19 invented building to create the “Oriental” setting for his figures (Fig. 17). The apparent naturalism of Gérôme’s technique and his inclusion of details like cracks in the mosaic tiles creates an illusion of documentary realism, making Gérôme’s invented, Orientalizing scene appear real and observed.38 The background of Yellow Nude could be seen in the same light, as securing the authenticity of an “Oriental” harem scene through its apparent closeness to actual ikat designs. The design is “ancient,” having been used throughout Central Asian history, yet its fabrication is clearly modern. Thus the ikat textile conjures Orientalism for the majority of viewers at Delaunay’s debut exhibition. It frames her Russian-Ukrainian ethnicity as uniquely advantageous to the primitive project while also foregrounding the modernity of this “primitive” culture to those familiar with the fabric. In her choice of background, Delaunay may undercut the assumptions of Orientalism and Fauvist primitivism, using the modernity of the ikat to counter the belief that looking to a non-“Western” culture is looking back-in-time to a pre- modern world like those created in Gérôme’s paintings.

Russian Culture, Jewish Labor

While the ikat primarily connoted the apparent “Orientalism” of the artist, the textile also held specific historic ties to both Russian and Jewish production. The fabric therefore redoubled the similarities between the created scene of Yellow Nude and Delaunay’s own biography. Fabric production had long been associated with specifically Jewish communities in Central Asia, which became known for its use of the ikat technique. As Russia extended its borders into these territories, the country increasingly imported ikats and began mass manufacture of fabrics to sell

38Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1989: 33-60). 20 back to these colonized areas. Delaunay’s Yellow Nude seems to allude to both of these histories in distinct, yet subtle, details of the pattern and its implied relationship to the figure.

While the ikat process originated in several cultures, the Central Asian version gained prominence. The method developed apparently concurrently in several disparate geographical locations, meaning that a large number of highly different fabrics fit the name. Latin America,

Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Indonesia all have ikat traditions, though with largely different motifs.39 The term itself comes from the Malay-Indonesian verb mengikat which roughly translates to “to wrap” or “to bind.”40 The longevity of practice in Central Asia, and the increased access European travelers had to the area in the nineteenth century, popularized the Central Asian version. Large collections of these fabrics bought from garment towns along the former Silk Road entered European museums as early as the 1880s. Russian

Imperial rule advanced this association by importing a large number of the luxury fabrics during colonial expansion into Central Asian territory.

During the nineteenth century, the ikat became associated with Russia and Russian “folk” culture. In this time, Russia increasingly imported ikat textiles into their urban centers. The

Empire also expanded into the less industrialized Central Asian territories producing them. This created a direct link between the design, and Russian Imperialism, and, by extension, the many

“folk” or “primitive” cultures within the nation.

By the early eighteenth century, the ikat had become associated with Jewish identity, as its production relied almost exclusively on Jewish labor.41 Central Asian Jewish communities had a wide trade network and thus often produced rich fabrics with exotic materials accessed on

39 Fitz Gibbon and Hale, “Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia,” 14. 40 Fitz Gibbon and Hale, “Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia,” 14. 41 I summarize this following description of Jewish labor in Central Asian fabric production from Fitz Gibbon and Hale, “Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia,” 170-5. 21 these trade routes. Jews also acted as the merchants for these fabrics, selling them abroad in many areas including Russia.42 Ikat production, specifically, flourished under early caliphate

Islamic governments ruling over these territories. This establishment generally permitted the

Bukharan Jews of the Central Asian area to live as dhimmi, or protected non-Muslims, within their territory and profited from their trade networks and fabric production. By the nineteenth century, the government restricted the Bukharan Jews to living inside the Sheikh Rangrez neighborhood (within Bukhara, present-day Uzbekistan), similar to the Pale settlement restrictions also established in Russia. Sheikh Rangrez was a famous fabric dyer and this neighborhood, named after him, was an important center for fabric dyeing. In making this area the designated territory for Jews living within caliphate-ruled regions, the government codified and reaffirmed the association of Jews with the fabric-dyeing industry. As fabric dyeing semi- permanently stained the worker’s hands, the use of Jews for this act that makes the body

“unclean” could also be viewed as an anti-Semitic division of labor. It may even have had the latent function of differentiating Jews from the Muslim population in a semi-permanent manner.43

In Yellow Nude, the non-naturalistic hues on the figure’s hands underscore this connection between Jews and the process of fabric dyeing. The figure’s right hand glows with cerulean blue. The left is overpainted from yellow to purple, matching the rouge on the figure’s cheeks and the textile’s ground color. While these colors comprise the shadowing on the rest of the body, it is more exaggerated on the figure’s hands. In addition to creating visual harmonies, this “staining” of the figure’s hands can connect the nude to the Jewish communities that made

42 Susan Meller, Russian Textiles: Printed Cloth for the Bazaars of Central Asia, (New York: Abrams, 2007), 11. 43 Meller, Russian Textiles, 11. 22 ikat textiles. Thus, the coloration of the figure references Jewishness and historic and contemporaneous anti-Semitism.

Further, the hues of bright yellow and turquoise Delaunay uses for the figure matches the colors of the Ukrainian flag and therefore also references the artist’s heritage and anti-Semitism.

Originating in various forms of national symbolism, the blue and yellow bicolor was used during the revolutions of 1848.44 It was briefly officially used in 1918 and readopted in the early 1990s following Ukrainian independence. While the region experienced significant political upheaval throughout these years, Delaunay lived in Gradizhsk, Ukraine — her birthplace — when it was within the Russian Pale of Settlement. The area and these colors acted, therefore, as another iteration of the separation and demarcation of the Jews from others in the population, analogous to the Rangrez neighborhood and the profession of fabric dyeing.

Delaunay’s truncation of the textile design, and her inclusion of a floral pattern on the pillow, could allude specifically to Russian adaptations of the traditional Central Asian ikat.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most Russian-made fabrics portrayed a tight flower pattern, connected through wandering vines, largely matching British and French pattern styles.45 From the 1830s on, Russian printed cotton textiles grew in popularity. By printing color onto a textile rather than weaving or dyeing it, Russian textiles allowed for colorful and intricate design at a much faster and more cost-effective rate. As Russia expanded its borders into Central Asian territories, they converted local economies to cotton production to fuel their export of fabrics back into the area.46 As Russia generally used cotton and not silk to create their

44 Bohdan Krawchenko, "National Memory in Ukraine: The Role of the Blue and Yellow Flag," Journal of Ukrainian Studies 15 (Summer 1990): 1-2 45 This and the following overview of Russian fabric production come from Susan Meller, Russian Textiles, 32. 46 Kate Fitz Gibbon, “The Social Life of Cloth,” in Russian Textiles: Printed Cloth for the Bazaars of Central Asia, Susan Meller, ed., (New York: Abrams, 2007), 24. 23 textiles, many Muslim robes were lined with Russian fabrics as Muslim sumptuary laws prohibited the wearing of silk against the skin. The Russian city of Ivanovo (north of Moscow) filled demand, sending Russian cottons into Central Asia, often to line the insides of their ikat robes, as seen in late nineteenth century examples (Fig. 18).47 Thus, there was a large market for these fabrics within Central Asia. Produced mainly through wood-block printing, the Russian designs are not within the fabric, as is the ikat coloration, but essentially stamped upon it.48

Thus, the truncation of the pattern at both the right and bottom edges of Delaunay’s painting could imply the pattern is an ikat created in Russia through this printing technique. With the addition of the French floral design and arguable Russian production, the fabrics bespeak the transnationality not only of the textile trade, but also of Delaunay herself.

Again, it is unclear how much of this history would have been familiar to Delaunay; however, some evidence suggests that she not only knew of the fabric, but also connected it to anti-Semitic labor practices in Russia. The Russian textile industry comprised a large percentage of the economy. As ikats were exported into and through Russia, it seems likely that a woman in affluent circles would have encountered them.49 Delaunay was raised in Odessa, where the

Jewish population of the Ukraine was forced to live, and spent her early childhood immersed in the regional culture. Writing on August 13, 1904, Delaunay recorded that she was reading

Semyon Yushkevich’s The Jews, a work of historical fiction about the hardship of Jewish life in

Russia.50 She reports having responded emotionally to the novella and particularly to its illustration of violent pogroms, writing that she was shaken to learn about this persecution.

47 Meller, Russian Textiles, 7.; Carmel, “Reversible Textiles.” 48 Meller, Russian Textiles, 7 49 Fitz Gibbon, “The Social Life of Cloth,” 24. 50 Her unpublished letters are in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This portion is reproduced in Jean-Claude Marcadé, “In St Petersburg,” in Sonia Delaunay, (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 20. 24

Importantly, however, Delaunay understood the historic and current mistreatment of Jews largely from second-hand sources. She acknowledged this cultural difference, reflecting in the same entry: “I read this narrative with great emotion – yet another incomprehensible thing, more questions, more tales of human suffering. And the people I belong to, but which I do not know at all, this universally despised people, is presented to me in a new light…everywhere, the Jews are foreigners, unwanted.” The last pogrom in Gradizhsk — Delaunay’s hometown — occurred in 1882, meaning this kind of widespread violence ended before her birth.51 Further removed to

St. Petersburg, Delaunay’s privilege allowed her to live a life that was less negatively impacted by her ethnicity, demonstrating that her self-presentation as representative of the “primitive” is partially a performed cultural association.

Yellow as a Jewish Signifier

Delaunay’s choice of the color yellow for the skin of the depicted nude may designate the painted version of her model as Jewish, thus indirectly alluding to the artist’s own identity. By

1908, the color yellow held historic and contemporaneous associations with prostitution and

Jewishness. The overlap of these categories developed out of anti-Semitism; historically, yellow was chosen to signify Jews because it already signified prostitutes, therefore lowering the status of Jews made to wear the color. At the time Delaunay made Yellow Nude, the Russian legal system had, inadvertently or otherwise, repeated this history. Russia used yellow documents to identify registered prostitutes. Tales of the high number of Jewish women registering as such, pervaded popular culture outside of Russia. Delaunay’s choice of color for her painted figure therefore appears to allude to collapse of prostitution and Jewishness. She captures the former through the figure’s Odalisque-inspired, prostitute-model positioning and the latter through her

51 Levin, “Threading Jewish Identity,” 91. 25 dyed hands, in the context of an ikat. Such a decision apparently features the perceived eroticism of Jewish women.52 This exaggerates the fetishization of the Otherness of Delaunay’s identity and reaffirms her innate qualification to paint the sexualized foreign female as depicted in primitivist painting. However, many modern-day Jewish women only legally registered as prostitutes to escape the restrictions of the Pale and to access higher education in the urban centers of Russia (by way of the freedom of movement afforded to prostitutes). In this context, the yellow of Delaunay’s figure signifies not Jewishness but anti-Semitism and the damaging results of the pervasive second-class status of Jews living in Russia. To those familiar with the specific struggles of operating in Russia as Jewish, Yellow Nude presents the lengths to which

Jewish women were forced to go to try to achieve a better life. This may even be mirrored in

Delaunay’s decision to paint Yellow Nude, as the image features her similarity to the apparently erotic foreign woman, apparently for the purpose of obtaining new status: a professional career within the Parisian avant-garde.

As stated, yellow served as an indicator for Jewishness throughout history and resurged in nineteenth century Ukraine and late nineteenth century Russia. The demarcation of Jewish people with yellow badges, currently remembered through the Nazi party’s re-implementation of the practice, extends back as early as the eighth century.53 Under Caliph Omar II, the Islamic government ruling some of Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa initiated the practice of differentiating Jews from the general population with legally enforced sartorial

52 Juliet Bellow describes the increasing sexualization of the Jewish woman in modern art as follows: “Images of Jewish women as “Rebeccas and Rachels of a radiant Oriental beauty, embellished with gold and jewels like Hindu idols, seated on the most precious carpet of Smyrna” became increasingly pervasive in Western art and literature beginning in the early nineteenth century, propelled by the Romantic fascination with the decadent setting of the East.” Bellow, “A Feminine Geography,” 37. Embedded quotation, Théophile Gautier, Le Voyage en Italie (1860) in Carol Ockman, “Two Large Eyebrows à l’Orientale,” Ingres’ Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 73. 53 I originally read this history and have taken my following summary from Barbara Wisch, “Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling,” in Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003). 26 identifiers.54 Prostitutes in the region dressed in yellow to differentiate themselves from other women, both as a protection for men and an advertisement for their services. By using yellow, with its existing associations with prostitution, to publicly identify Jewish individuals, these governments shamed the Jewish population. The color remained connected to the Jewish people throughout history, even appearing on a Jewish ancestor of Christ on the Sistine Ceiling, as the scholar Barbara Wish first noted in a study of its iconography; Michelangelo’s Aminidab sports the round yellow signum of papally-dictated Jewish identification on his left sleeve (Fig. 19). By some accounts, Jews in Ukraine wore yellow fabric patches on their clothes into the 1870s.55

The use of yellow as a Jewish signifier was in living memory in 1908, at the time

Delaunay painted her nude. While prostitutes no longer wore yellow clothing by this time,

Russian prostitutes carried government issued “yellow tickets” as their passport, medical examination card, and identification papers.56 While yellow tickets were unique to Russia, the colloquialism of “taking a yellow ticket” undoubtedly disseminated beyond national borders.

Most notably, in the first few chapters of Crime and Punishment (published in 1866), Fyodor

Dostoyevsky features the moral quandary of minor character Sonia Marmeladova taking a yellow ticket to help support her impoverished family.57 Dostoyevsky then repeatedly uses yellow to symbolize misery. Contemporaneous use of Russian yellow tickets mirrored the historical association of prostitution and anti-Semitism, as Jewish women began taking yellow

54 Wisch, “Vested Interest,” 146. 55 Because of the fragmentation of the area it is unclear the extent to which this practice survived into the 1880s. This is not to say, however, that the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the period is unclear; the decade saw some of the most violent pogroms in the region’s history. M. Avrum Ehrlich, Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 1010. 56 Laurie Bernstein, “The State and the Yellow Ticket,” in Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 57 Sonia Delaunay was well read and this Russian paragon of literature likely would not have escaped her intellectual readings — including everything from Nietzsche to Baudelaire. For a portion of her reading list, see Marcadé, “In St Petersburg.” For the fictional account of the yellow ticket, see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, (New York: The Heritage Club, 1938). 27 tickets in order to travel outside of the Pale. In her book on prostitution in Imperial Russia,

Laurie Bernstein discusses the paternalistic motivations behind regulating rather than banning prostitution; it allowed male control, in the form of doctors, government workers, and police, over those women who turned to prostitution likely because they no longer had fathers or patriarchal figures regulating their behavior.58 For these women, the yellow passport tightened male and governmental control over their bodies through mandatory regular medical examinations and registration as a “public women.” However, for Jewish women, this dynamic reversed. Normally unable to move freely outside of the Pale, Jewish women with yellow passports gained access to the big cities of Russia beyond the borders of the Settlement, though not without compromise nor risk.

Delaunay escaped the difficulties of her family’s financial position and the constraints on the mobility of Jews within the Russian Empire through her uncle’s material success. As a

Jewish woman who migrated outside of the Pale, she escaped the hardships experienced by much of the Jewish population. Her privilege and geographic distance from the majority of Jewish populations in Russia afforded her both freedoms unavailable to most and a tenuous connection to a part of her heritage that still affected the way others perceived her. Undoubtedly, her difference from other Russian-Jewish women’s experiences did not lessen her acknowledgement that, if not for her uncle, she would be living under these same constraints, which captivated popular culture and inspired international conversation on the treatment of Jews in Russia.

The injustice of Jewish women having to legally register as prostitutes in order to travel intensified concerns worldwide over the treatment of the Jewish people. In 1914, the topic came to Broadway in Michael Morton’s play, The Yellow Ticket. The same year, the American

58 Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, 3. 28 publication The Theater covered both the play and Russian-Jewish calls for the abolition of the

Pale.59 In it, Morton describes his inspiration for the piece and his view of the life of Jewish women in Russia through moral concerns: “Can you conceive of it? Just consider! A Jewish girl, wishing to go to a sick father, husband, brother, or to go somewhere and secure an education in order to better herself, must sell her soul and be robbed of all worth-while in life!”60 In the same article, Chief Rabbi Hertz confirms Morton’s account of the Russian Jewish woman’s experience and adds that police seek out these women to return them to the Pale and, more recently, he implies, sexually assault them, “with the intention of bringing their actual life into line with their normal calling.”61 Together the two accounts and their appearance in an

American newspaper speaks to the wide dissemination of the connection between the yellow ticket and Jewish women. The text also speaks to the Russian perception as “Eastern” or

“Western” in the early-twentieth century. Morton attests to not knowing the actual situation of the distant and vast Russian Empire, while Hertz admonishes the backwardness of Russian policy as antithetical to its status as a European government.

Therefore, the connotations of yellow with both Jewishness and with prostitution, and the complex moral perception of Russian-Jewish women within and outside Russia, could be read in

Delaunay’s use of the color yellow on the context of a geographically and racially otherized nude female body. With this context, Yellow Nude presents the common linkage of ethnic

“otherness,” and the fetishization of the foreign body. She also features the consequences of ethnic differentiation and the effects of anti-Semitism on many who share her background.

59 “The Yellow Ticket,” The Theater 19, no. 156 (Feb 1914): 64, 94-95. 60 “The Yellow Ticket,” 94. 61 “The Yellow Ticket,” 95. 29

To those accustomed to only the French Orientalist or primitivist tradition, Yellow Nude conforms to the stereotypical view of the foreign woman currently popular in France. Those with this view of the foreign woman and her abilities, would see Delaunay as the instinctual, reflexive painter of the “Eastern” female spaces to which she had privileged access — the

“harem” reading. For the large number of Russian or Eastern European expatriates living in

Montparnasse, the image specifies the modernism of the supposedly less-modern “East.”

Similarly, while the yellow of Yellow Nude may have read as a symbol of prostitution to those aware of the artist’s Russian background, on first glance the nude reflects only the expressive coloration of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ or of Matisse’s Blue Nude. To another Jewish woman — like those Delaunay lived with upon first moving to Montparnasse — the work may very well read as Delaunay’s interrogation of the treatment and sexualization of Jewish women. The complexity of these layered associations within Yellow Nude make the image incredibly well calibrated to Delaunay’s circumstance. To most, she repeats the genre to the primitivist nude.

To those who share her background, she may subverts these stereotypes, making the work a savvy acceptance and mobilization of what would otherwise be an ostracizing position of difference.

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PART II: THE MASK AND DISJUNCTIVE CONSTRUCTION

Separated from the body and defined by its outline, the face in Yellow Nude mimics the shape and disengagement of a mask. A dark turquoise line cuts the figure’s jawline away from her neck and shoulder, visually rupturing the expected harmony of face and body. A light reddish-orange outline carves the rest of the face away from the encircling dark hair. Even these contours create dissonance as the contrasts of red-orange and blue-green argue for visual primacy. The internal construction of the face reaffirms its mask-like quality. The unnatural visual elements of sharp facial planes, overall lack of depth, and vacant eye sockets combine into a mask-like face that calls into question the reality of the depicted figure.

This masking of the figure operates similarly to the ikat textile. The ikat references

Orientalism and may also undercut the themes of the genre. Similarly, the trope of the mask is a clear referent to Primitivism, then popular in Paris. While conforming to this style in the main,

Delaunay’s application of the mask may also call attention to the invented, unrealistic aspects and ideologies of the primitivist movement. As Delaunay’s ikat apparently referenced the timelessness of “Oriental” space while actually indicating the opposite to those familiar with the fabric, the mask sexualizes and primitivizes the depicted figure while perhaps highlighting the construction of such a body as a European male fantasy. By refusing to harmonize the mask with the body and by also creating division in the perspective of the painting and the gender of the figure, Delaunay’s nude appears — more clearly than many figures at the time — to be a constructed, unreal, invented scene and woman. More specifically, I argue, Delaunay deployed the motif of an Africanized mask within Yellow Nude. By using this mask, on an eroticized female body, Delaunay aligned her painting with other primitivist nudes of the period, like

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Matisse’s Blue Nude and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. At the same time, Delaunay’s handling of this motif differs from that of her male peers: Delaunay’s painting includes highly visible disjunction between the mask-like face and the model’s body, conflicting perspectival regimes, and similarly disjunctive gender ambiguity. These three aspects may have undermined the presented vision of the “primitive” woman to viewers at the Galerie-Notre-Dame-des-

Champs. Together, I argue, these aspects of Yellow Nude create both a repetition and a critique of the racial and sexual connotations of the primitivist nude.

My reading complicates the way in which Delaunay’s painting is currently understood by feminist scholars. Rather than reading Yellow Nude as an overt refutation of the objectified female, I argue that the painting undercuts the type by apparently conforming to it, rather than rejecting it. This position adds nuance to the apparent proto-feminism read into many works by female artists. Many of these women mobilized their identities to navigate a patriarchal avant- garde; they chose to benefit from the current association of the female body with “nature” and downplayed the ramifications of accepting this position.

For Delaunay and many other female painters, the choice to work in the genre of the female nude was double-edged. While the subject signified “high” art, the women within such paintings were often objectified. To work within the genre conveyed a sense of professionalism as it followed in the path of “greats” known for their paintings of the female nude, like Paul

Gauguin. However, as the “type” of the female nude was patriarchally defined, such nudes were typically sexualized. For a female artist, working on a female nude could easily require her to objectify or voyeuristically display the female body. As a number of female artists chose to work in this subject, many evidently felt that the benefits of painting the nude outweighed the risks of recreating negative associations with their gender. In much of feminist scholarship,

32 these female nudes by female painters are analyzed for only their subversion of the genre, as it is expected that a female painter would not create a nude from the same objectifying vantage as many male artists.

Following this tendency, Albritton sees a “feminist consciousness” in Delaunay’s Yellow

Nude. She compares Delaunay’s rendering with those of Paula Modersohn-Becker and other paintings of women by women. She reads these works, together, as proto-feminist, rejecting the sexist archetype for the female nude established by male artists.62 She writes, “These women were visually examining themselves and other women in distinct contrast to the avant-garde portraits of them by men.”63

Modersohn-Becker recreates and subverts the genre of the primitive female nude by portraying her painted women as maternal, rather than sexual. In her analysis of the artist,

Gillian Perry discusses the “double-edge” of Modersohn-Becker’s decision to paint the female nude. She writes that the genre of the primitive woman was driving German Expressionism at the moment; it popularized and pervaded throughout avant-garde artistic circles. Paintings of the nude female, however, often compromised the position of women in German society by collapsing the category of woman with “primitive” or natural values. Perry argues that

Modersohn-Becker’s work within the genre of the female nude both placed her within contemporaneous debates on the direction of art and repositioned the objectified role of women within primitive painting. She writes that Modersohn-Becker refutes the patriarchal sexualization of the female nude. By painting her women breastfeeding; she redefines the

62 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 93-94. 63 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 77. 33 perceived naturalism of women to their maternalism rather than their sexuality.64 Both Perry and

Albritton point to Modersohn-Becker’s Reclining Mother and Child (1906) as evidence of her feminist reclamation of the genre (Fig. 20). The image portrays a full-length nude, revealed to the viewer, matching primitivist precedents. Modersohn-Becker’s figure, however, nurses a child, her form mirroring that of the infants. The painting therefore shows the naturalism of women, like many primitivist paintings, but in a less sexist light.

Following this example, Albritton reads the body of Yellow Nude as desexualized. She argues that the figure has a non-sensuous construction, affronting gaze, and evident agency that prevent the viewer from objectifying her form. She states that Delaunay, like Modersohn-

Becker, significantly transforms the genre of the female nude because of her gender. To

Albritton, while Modersohn-Becker achieves this feminist vantage through maternalism,

Delaunay uses female agency. Albritton writes that Delaunay’s “female nude is not that of a nurturer but rather a young woman, powerful in her own right, staring at the viewer like a brassier Olympia.”65 Delaunay’s rendering of the figure’s face is key to Albritton’s interpretation; she reads it as “mask-like and harsh,” refuting any voyeuristic pleasure to the implied male viewer.66

I instead argue that the apparent proto-feminism of women-painting-women is not as readily available in Yellow Nude as in Reclining Mother and Child. I counter Albritton’s interpretation in two key ways: I argue the figure is not afforded a gaze and that she is sexualized. While I agree that Delaunay’s painting may be seen as a subversion of the primitive

64 Gillian Perry, “‘The Ascent to Nature’: Some Metaphors of ‘Nature’ in Early Expressionist Art,” in Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, eds., Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993): 53-64, 62. 65 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 93-94. 66 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 93-94. 34 female nude, I argue that this alteration occurs through the figure’s similarity to rather than difference from the genre. Exaggerating the mask-like quality of the faces from Picasso’s Les

Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Blue Nude, Delaunay’s mask is empty. Her figure is not, in fact, afforded eyes with which she may confront the male viewer. Again, like these male- made precedents, Delaunay’s figure’s nudity, intimate distance from the viewer, and Odalisque positioning all implicate her sexuality. In a similar vein to Leo Steinberg’s argument for Les

Demoiselles d’Avignon, I argue that the non-sensuous construction of a figure does not remove her sexuality, particularly when read as a prostitute, as Picasso and Delaunay likely intended.67

By reading the nude as intimate and sexual, I am reformulating the current understanding of

Delaunay’s relationship to depictions of the nude. I relocate the discussion from women who desexualize the female nude, like Modersohn-Becker, to women who recreate a sexualizing view of the nude woman, as in paintings by Tamara de Lempicka. From this perspective, I read

Yellow Nude as, largely, conforming to, not countering, the genre. This affords Delaunay the professionalism attached to painters of the female nude without ostracizing her art from the type of the day. I also place the gender ambiguity of Delaunay’s figure within both German and

Orientalist traditions, classifying her presented version of primitivism and the pan-nation, quai- universal type sought by many avant-garde painters. From this position, Delaunay’s use of the mask and the disjunctive body extends the genre to its limits, perhaps subtly subverting it by exposing the cracks extant within the archetype as it currently exists in avant-garde paintings.

The Mask

The mask-like face of Delaunay’s figure responded to, and likely derived from, avant-garde appropriations of “African” masks. Following the French colonization of West Africa, a large

67 Albritton designates the figure in Yellow Nude both overtly as a prostitute, and implicitly though this comparison with Olympia. 35 number of cultural objects from these areas were exported to France. These objects began to circulate in Paris just after the turn of the twentieth century. Many artists saw, in these items, ready inspiration for their primitivist styles. Most accounts attribute the popularity of the trope of the mask at this moment to avant-garde artists’ “discovery” of a specific Fang mask. This mask was imported from colonial French Gabon and passed among a circle of artists including

Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Matisse, and Picasso.68 This Fang mask presents thin, arched brows knitted together at the bridge of the long, narrow, and sharply angled nose (Fig.

21). The small eyes are narrow and empty. The thin oval mouth sits almost at the bottom of the mask and just slightly reveals small lower teeth. An outer rim of striped and triangular geometric patterning encircles the wooden, white-washed face. Many accounts date the use of the mask in avant-garde painting to 1905 and Vlaminck’s “discovery” of this particular Fang mask.

In reality, the appearance of the mask-like face in French painting predates 1905. As

Joshua Cohen established, mask-like faces were commonly used in avant-garde depictions of women by the time Vlaminck “discovered” the Fang mask. In Vlaminck’s Reclining Nude

(1905), for example, a female figure, drawn from the artist’s observation of a prostitute at a

Montmartre nightclub, is caked in makeup: strongly outlined divisions between the chin and neck as well as the face and eyes that together create the semblance of a mask (Fig. 22). Cohen argues that for Vlaminck this mask-like visage “mitigate[d] the shaming gazes of his female subjects.” By masking the woman in his painting, Vlaminck impeded her ability to return the gaze of the male viewer. 69 Male viewers can, therefore, observe her nude form without being subjected to her gaze or psychologically diminished by her agency. Similarly, Robert Lubar

68 Cohen, “Fauve Masks.” 69 Cohen, “Fauve Masks ,” 145. 36 argues that Pablo Picasso, in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1907), used a mask-like face to defuse the threat posed by Stein’s queer identity to his own masculinity (Fig. 23).70 Lubar notes that Stein’s face, with a clear separation of neck and chin and almond-shaped eyes, derived from

Iberian sculpture. He argues that Stein’s homosexuality, and her non-conformity to binary gender, unsettled Picasso; in response, he masked her, reclaiming his masculine authority. The mask therefore negotiated sexual power between the genders. It diminished the agency of the female sitter to alleviate the effect of her gaze on the implied viewer.

Uses of the mask-like face post-1905 included a racial element. By appropriating the design of the Fang mask, or other perceived-as-primitive objects from the day, artists geographically and racially distanced the subjects of their paintings. Matisse’s Blue Nude and

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for example, implicated the racial “difference” of the

“Africanized” mask to exaggerate the sexuality of the featured women. This follows the primitivist (and racist) view of the foreign Other as overtly sexual.

Following from these precedents, Delaunay’s use of the mask-like face both sexualizes and racially Otherizes her figure. This mirrors the function of the ikat textile: both the ikat and the mask imply geographic distance. The ikat references the space of the “Orient” and the mask, in this context, recalls the French colonies in Africa. The former is framed as erotic by

Orientalism, and the latter, through Primitivism. Again, like the ikat, Delaunay’s use of the mask may also undercut the tenants of the genre it references. It is unclear if Delaunay’s connections in the Parisian art world acquainted her with any of the particular masks or sculptures appropriated by avant-garde painters.71 It seems more likely that her version of the mask was

70 Robert S. Lubar, “Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 57–84. 71 Albritton, “The Zenith Years,” 85. 37 derived second-hand from Fauve and Cubist renderings. Her painting is therefore a step removed from the cultures these other artists appropriated. Given the way Delaunay employed the ikat textile, it is tempting to imagine that she may have realized that these purportedly

“primitive” masks were in reality modern objects made in response to European colonial intervention. While this information was likely not accessible to the artist, it is possible that her knowledge of the realities of life in her “primitive” hometown caused her to view the supposedly

“primitive,” “non-modern” qualities afforded to the “Africanized mask” with some skepticism.

Her use of the mask in Yellow Nude does hint at a fission between the connotations of the mask and the figure onto which they are placed. By leaving the mask eyeless, uninhabited, and unintegrated with the rest of the figure, Delaunay may be placing the connotations of the

“primitive,” signified through the mask, as an unreal façade placed onto primitive women.

The Disjunctive Body

While objectifying in the main, Delaunay’s inharmonious construction of the nude figure, like her use of the mask, may subtly fracture the effect of the primitive fantasy. Delaunay likely saw

Matisse’s Blue Nude at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants and may be referencing his view of the primitive woman in Yellow Nude. Then exhibited under the title Tableau No. III, Matisse’s painting also played with the reality of the depicted figure. Critics received the awkward form and gender of Matisse’s figure as the artist making a joke of modern painting. They perceived his nude as being “as strangely constructed as she [was] bizarrely painted.”72 The painting presents an exaggeration of the physiognomy of the foreign woman. The figure’s enlarged buttocks were, at the time, associated with racial difference through the exploitative display of

Sara Baartman. Blue Nude’s prominent breasts, equally non-naturalized to the figure’s form,

72 Write, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, 166-7. 38 present a parody of femininity. Alistair Wright has suggested Blue Nude reveals the internal contradictions of contemporaneous attempts to categorize races through physiological differences. Delaunay’s figure, with similarly prominent buttocks and oppositional lack of breasts may raise a similar interrogation of the stereotypes of race.

Yellow Nude presents to the viewer an androgynous body from multiple vantages. These conflicting perspectives create contradictory viewing positions: the figure is seen both at eye- level and from above simultaneously. The tension between these vantages either marks the viewer as intimately close to the figure or reveals her to be a constructed fantasy. The figure may comprise various perspectives, as in Cubist representations, to allude to the inability of a close viewer to see an object as a whole, in the kind of linear perspective used in traditional painting. Or, these inconsistent viewpoints disillusion the scene, indicating it is not observed, but constructed. The figure is therefore either intimately observed, heightening the primitivist fantasy, or she is an artistic construct, that may refute this view of the foreign woman by marking her as unreal and invented.

Establishing the first viewing position, the lower half of the body places the viewer above the figure. Her extended arm clearly reaches below the eye-line, making the back of the hand visible to the viewer. Painted almost without perspectival foreshortening, and extending from an arm overlapping the figure, the hand situates the viewer in a near bird’s-eye position. The figure’s lower leg supports this reading, primarily because it is overlapped by the upper leg and stomach and therefore visually below and away from the viewer. The vantage is, in fact, so high, that the viewer can see only the curve of the stomach without a hint of how it conforms to the volume of the supporting leg. This bottom leg further shows the inner portion of the knee and thigh, apparently parallel to the supporting surface, rather than the knee cap or reflected shadow

39 that would result from looking at or up at the figure respectively. This top-down view repeats to varying degrees of clarity in other portions of the body. At the juncture of back and hip, for example, strong contours cutting into the figure’s torso and the shading between these lines creates the illusion of looking down at the midriff of the body. Reconciled with the background, this creates an image of a figure stretched out below the viewer on a bed or rug. The visible patterning on the top of the supporting pillow would seem to confirm this viewing position.

Forming the second, opposing vantage, the top-down perspective slides into an eye-level perspective toward the top of the painting. The face aligns with the plane of the canvas without mediating foreshortening. The hand supporting the figure’s head shows a similarly direct and flat plane to the viewer, existing only in profile without overlap of the hand and wrist or exposure of the tops of the fingers that would continue the quasi-bird’s eye perspective from the lower portion of the canvas. Similarly pitched, the figure’s shoulder hovers at and a bit above eye-level, revealing its front rather than top to the spectator. Viewed from this frontal position, the background becomes a backdrop, perhaps a wall hanging, behind and not below the figure.

The pillow also shifts as the green inner edge comes into focus and morphs the strong row of pink flower patterning into a continuation of the seam, creating a square cushion the viewer looks directly at rather than down upon.

These two conflicting perspectival regimes create, firstly, an intimate viewing position.

The various perspectives simulates closeness, pulling the viewer into the figure’s space by allowing the viewer to look both down at the figure’s body and meet her eye-line, as if following a discordant and repetitious gaze moving up the figure from a place too close to view her in full at once. She is therefore stitched together from many intimate glimpses, an observed but incompletely seen form that draws in the gaze and by extension the viewer themselves.

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These incongruous perspectives also read as artificial, revealing the unreality of the created image and the woman herself. Comprising contradictory vantages, the figure itself appears unreal. As the background flattens to the place of the canvas, the space of this figure is also unreal, redoubling the apparent construction of the figure as a painted and invented scene.

While each of these interpretations hold separate implications, both invoke an element of fantasy. In the first instance, the fantasy of intimacy with the painted body and in the second, the fantasy of constructing such a body for the gaze. Both of these possibilities entail a different level of Delaunay’s participation in or subversion of the genre of the primitivizing nude. If

Delaunay wants to allude to the constructed nature of the primitivized female body, her intentions are subversive; by creating perspectival disagreement, she reveals the unreality of the

“exotic Orient,” the way Europeans imagine the space, and the fantasy of the sexualized

“Oriental” female. If, however, the perspectival inconsistencies imply intimacy and physical closeness, then the work instead engages with unresolved questions of female authorship and homoerotic desire.

The closeness of Delaunay’s figure to the viewer prefigures that of Tamara de

Lempicka’s La Bella Rafaela (1927) which presents a similar and more exaggerated intimate view of a reclining nude (Fig. 24). Contemporaneous interpretations of Lempicka’s image read both a sexualizing gaze and Orientalist locale into the work, nearly matching most accounts of

Delaunay’s Yellow Nude. Paula Birnbaum also makes a similar argument to my above interpretation regarding the closeness and odd perspective of Lempicka’s painting:

The artist strategically plays to the Western conventions of the voluptuous odalisque, a languidly reclining and sexually available inhabitant of a harem…Lempicka has reduced the background composition to basic geometric planes of black, gray, and red tones as a way to heighten the viewer’s experience of her model’s curvaceous physique…Lempicka

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was giving form to her own palpable desire and obvious pleasure in her model’s curvaceous body by emphasizing its fleshiness in close-up perspective.73

Featuring the artist’s bisexuality, this interpretation joins an intimate perspective with the artist’s own pleasure in her figure’s form. Birnbaum also argues that the contrast of a geometric background and a curvy female figure heighten the eroticism of the “harem” figure. Again, placing the reclining female nude within the space of the harem, and by implied extension, the

“Orient.” Thus, the intimate perspective in Delaunay’s painting both ingratiates her work to the male viewer and male subject position through erotic presentation of the female body while also alluding to the association of Orientalism with homoeroticism, queerness, and alternate modes of gender and sexual interaction.

Primitivism and Orientalism overlap most clearly with the use of the Odalisque. With ambiguous age and gender designation, the figure in Yellow Nude engages with the racial and gendered stereotypes of sexuality that underpin both modern primitivist and Orientalist painting.

Delaunay does not choose to create a coy, chaste-passing Venus Pudica that generations of artists have passed off as stimulating, a solely aesthetic pleasure in the spectator.74 She instead references male paintings of the available female body, nearly foreshadowing Matisse’s later

Harem Fantasy series and all of its assumptive, problematic conflation of the foreign female body with sexual availability. Yellow Nude’s combination of black stockings and nudity recall

Toulouse-Lautrec renderings of La Goulue and women working in the Rue des Moulins Brothel.

Yellow Nude’s face is made-up like the previously discussed Vlaminck prostitute painting. The red flower set against the figure’s dark hair of Delaunay’s figure is reminiscent of Matisse’s La

73 Paula Birnbaum, “Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist,” in Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, eds., The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 97-99. 74 Alison Smith, “The Nude at Public Exhibition,” in The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, morality and art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996): 101-132. 42

Coiffure (1907), itself likely a referent to geisha paintings following the Japonisme influence, seen in works like Marie-François Firmin-Girard’s Toilette Japonaise (1873) (Figs. 25 and 26).

The pose and textile arrangement in Yellow Nude match that of Orientalist photography circulating through France in the early 1900s (Fig. 27). Delaunay therefore creates in Yellow

Nude a reclining Odalisque, positioned, as in precedents, to openly reveal body of the painted figure to the viewer. At distance, the arch of the buttocks and hip even mimic the shape of a buttocks viewed from behind, with the join of the upper leg and stomach echoing the meeting line of the buttocks. Thus from the waist down, the figure’s exposed front mirrors the back, inaccessible to the viewer from this angle, but now exposed through this visual echo. The figure is therefore almost fully exposed to the spectator, with not even the opposite side of her body protected from the gaze. This double revelation of the body to the viewer supports an intentionally sexualized reading. Thus as an exposed, reclining Odalisque, Delaunay’s figure joins primitivism and Orientalism, both capturing and brining into question the problematic assumptions of both genres in regard to the foreign female.

Delaunay’s specific construction and rendition of the female nude also creates the universal, pan-national, and harmonized primitive sought by many avant-garde painters; the referents within her work cue French and African visual traditions through the mask alongside

Germanic and Orientalist visual traditions through the gender ambiguity of the figure. The flatness of Yellow Nude’s chest, at odds with the parody of feminine sex-identification in

Matisse’s Blue Nude, places the painting within the dialogues on sex and gender occurring in

German Expressionism and Orientalism. Matisse endows his nude with exaggerated breasts that aggressively cue female, engaging with the gender instability in European perception of other races by creating a hyper-feminine and simultaneously hyper-masculine — in her muscular arms

43 and geometric face — image of the foreign women. Delaunay, instead, creates androgyny through a flat chest, simultaneously communicating both youth and the male gender.

Constructed with the intense yellow common to German Expressionists, Yellow Nude recalls German Expressionist images of the adolescent female. As Delaunay studied there for two years before coming to Paris, and travelled back to Germany between 1905 and 1908, she likely encountered by the Die Brücke representation of the female nude as primitive, and liberated through youth and the cultural debates over female sexuality that coincided. Sherwin

Simmons circles through all of these debates in his analysis of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s pedophilic paintings of his model Marzella. Simmons writes, “her existence on the cusp of puberty made her ‘freer,’ ‘richer,’ and ‘more complete’ than more mature females. His libido was drawn intensely by her idealized pregenital stage; she was a nonthreatening object of desire that could be controlled but whose shame elicited identification with her.”75 Simmons then explains how puberty and its gender instability served as a less threatening vehicle for exploring homosexual desire.

Orientalism holds this same slippage between youth and homoeroticism, communicating the foreign, racial, and geographic difference through gender instability. In his book on the subject, Joseph Allen Boone recounts how French Orientalist painters sized up existing feminization and sexualization of young, beautiful boys in Islamic culture to solidify their difference, and moral deficiency in comparison to French culture.76 He, like Linda Nochlin, uses

Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, as a central example, comparing the title figure in the painting to

75Sherwin Simmons, “Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913-16.” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (2000): 117–48., 552. 76 Joseph Allen Boone, “Beautiful Boys, Sodomy, and Hamams: A Textual and Visual History of Tropes” in The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) 51-107. 44

Arabic poetry that describes the pubescent, and therefore functionally unsexed boy, with the intimate language normally associated with descriptions of women.

Against these histories, the atypical gender presentation of Delaunay’s figure becomes a signifier of both the foreignness of her painted nude and of the universality of her version of “the primitive.” Through these disparate associations, Delaunay has rendered a nude body that is undeniably foreign, “Eastern” or “Middle Eastern” through its textile and gender ambiguity as well as African through the mask and French and German through aesthetic similarities. Her version of the “primitive body” is exactly that universal, atavistic image of the non-modern that primitivism as a movement sought to unlock. She parodies the supposed heightened sexuality of such a non-European, “primitive” culture through gender ambiguity and instability, itself a sign for increased sexuality in both Germanic and Orientalist visual traditions.

The disjunctive artificiality of the face and the body reaffirm Delaunay’s game; the mask

Delaunay wears is one of she invents for primitivism. She wears her foreignness and difference as a mask, using them to stand out and claim unique access to “primitivism.” In this manner, her work is highly similar to other immigrant artists from those mentioned in the introduction

(Chagall and Modigliani) and other Russian-Jewish women working outside of their native country. Delaunay uses the mask as not only an icon of primitivism, but a device of gender and sexual mediation between the artist, figure, and viewer. Delaunay’s masked figure navigates between these two poles, courting a sexual fantasy in line with the Matisse/Vlaminck/Picasso handling of “primitive” female nudes at the turn of the century. However, she also may intercede within this narrative by asserting its fiction thorough the empty mask and bodily abstraction. Delaunay’s supposed privileged access to the authentic-primitive-woman stereotype

45 granted through her heritage, allows her the insider perspective to present, but more importantly to deconstruct, this image.

Exhibited in the largely immigrant neighborhood of Montparnasse, the painting’s audience reflects the body; a conglomeration of small cultural enclaves of multiple diasporas that together form the bohemian artistic society of the Left Bank. Delaunay’s Yellow Nude spoke to the German Expressionists, Russian and Jewish expatriates, and French Fauvists all circling through Montparnasse. She offers a complicit image of the “primitive” woman, likely to help her access the avant-garde through her difference, while providing subtle indications of her awareness of the lie of this problematic primitivist ideology.

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CONCLUSION

The largest work in Delaunay’s solo exhibition, Yellow Nude acted both as a manifesto of her difference and excluded identity while showing the average viewer an Oriental and primitive nude — in line with the moment — from an arguably more authentic hand. On display in 1908 at Wilhelm Uhde’s gallery, the work matches the desires of her Parisian audience while subtextually criticizing this fetishization of the East. Delaunay’s Yellow Nude presents the artist’s identity as a qualifying attribute, despite the reality of dominating racist and sexist views of the “foreign women” that underpinned much of modern art. Delaunay aligns her work with the European fantasy of the erotic Other rather than directly confronting her audience with the historic specificity of asserting Otherness. The painting therefore mobilizes her identity to capitalize on the primitivist problem and present herself as uniquely positioned to find that global, universal, primitivist aesthetic that so many artists of her day sought to capture in their work.

Delaunay’s Yellow Nude therefore plays into the stereotypical association in the French imaginary of Russia with the “Orient” while subtly subverting those associations for viewers familiar with the histories of the elements in her painting. It also invites viewers to associate

Delaunay herself with the signifiers of Russian, Jewish, and Orientalized identity in her painting.

This was a risky strategy: She stood on the razor’s edge between affirming and critiquing the racist beliefs that underpinned primitivist art. She plays up her biography to position herself as closer to the “primitive” than the French-born Matisse — and thus to secure for herself a place in the Parisian avant-garde. On the surface, Yellow Nude gave visitors to her exhibition a modernist,

Orientalized nude painting. Its success in that arena is testified to by the fact that the carefully

47 calibrated symbolism in Delaunay’s vision of the “exotic” has passed entirely unrecognized until now.

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ILLUSTRATIONS Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Sonia Delaunay, Yellow Nude, 1908, oil on canvas.

Figure 2: Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1907, oil on canvas.

Figure 3: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas.

Figure 4: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Nude Woman, 1904, drawing on paper. In Sonia Delaunay.

English ed. (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 40.

Figure 5: Sonia Delaunay, Seated Nude, 1905, drawing on paper. In Sherry A. Buckberrough,

Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective (Buffalo, N.Y: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1980), 17.

Figure 6: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Young Girl, 1905, drawing on paper. Sherry A.

Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective (Buffalo, N.Y: Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

1980), 126.

Figure 7: Sonia Delaunay, Study of a Young Girl, 1905, drawing on paper. Sherry A.

Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective (Buffalo, N.Y: Albright-Knox Art Gallery,

1980), 127.

Figure 8: Sonia Delaunay, Cradle Cover, 1911, various textiles.

Figure 9: Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1912, limestone.

Figure 10: Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1913, oil on canvas.

Figure 11: Wall-hanging, probably Samarkand, third quarter 19th century. In Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: The Guido Goldman Collection,

(London: Laurence King, 1999), 23.

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Figure 12: Wall-hanging, probably Samarkand, third quarter 19th century. In Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: The Guido Goldman Collection,

(London: Laurence King, 1999), 135.

Figure 13: Mikhail Larionov, Gypsy of Tiraspol, 1909, oil on canvas.

Figure 14: Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,

1897, oil on canvas.

Figure 15: Ikat detail, silk and cotton with glaze, before 1870. In Ruby Clark, Central Asian

Ikats: From the Rau Collection, Pbk. Ed (London : New York: V&A Publications; Distributed in

North America by Harry N. Abrams, 2007), 25.

Figure 16: Man’s robe, silk and cotton, lined with printed cotton, after 1900. In Ruby Clark,

Central Asian Ikats: From the Rau Collection, Pbk. Ed (London : New York: V&A Publications;

Distributed in North America by Harry N. Abrams, 2007), 36.

Figure 17: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 1879, oil on canvas.

Figure 18: Woman’s Munisak (shown inside out), late nineteenth-early twentieth century, adras ikat, lined with Russian printed cotton. In Susan Meller, Russian Textiles: Printed Cloth for the

Bazaars of Central Asia, (New York: Abrams, 2007), 180.

Figure 19: Michelangelo, Aminadab Lunette, 1512, fresco.

Figure 20: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child, 1906, oil on canvas.

Figure 21: Fang Mask, Gabon, pre-1905, wood. In Joshua I. Cohen, “Fauve Masks: Rethinking

Modern ‘Primitivist’ Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2

(April 3, 2017), 140.

Figure 22: Maurice de Vlaminck, Reclining Nude, 1905, oil on canvas.

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Figure 23: Pablo Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1907, oil on canvas.

Figure 24: Tamara de Lempicka, La Bella Rafaela, 1927, oil on canvas.

Figure 25: Henri Matisse, La Coiffure, 1907, oil on canvas.

Figure 26: Marie-François Firmin-Girard, Toilette Japonaise, 1873, oil on canvas.

Figure 27: [Orientalist nude study], France, 1900. Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist

Photography Collection, The Getty Digital Collections. Jacobson number: 647_23unkn.

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