Sonia Delaunay's Yellow Nude, 1908
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© 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. ii 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 iii 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 iv 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 v 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