Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Sonia alone

The Russian-born French artist emerges from her husband's shadows - and triumphs

In 1978, shortly before she died, the artist Sonia Delaunay was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a feminist. ‘No! I despise the word!’ she replied. ‘I never thought of myself as a woman in any conscious way. I’m an artist.’

It is pretty obvious, though, that the Sonia Delaunay retrospective at Tate Modern (which has come from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) has been organised if not explicitly by feminists, then at least with feminism in mind. You can see the thinking behind it: let’s give the wives of the artists a break. And Mrs Delaunay, whose work has traditionally been discussed in the same breath as her artist husband Robert’s, must have seemed a suitable candidate for some revisionism.

So Robert has been stripped out as much as possible, to give Sonia a chance to emerge from the shadows. Yet she was never really in them. The show begins with her arrival in Paris in 1906, when she was introduced to the work of the impressionists, post-impressionists and fauves. In her early portraits (a number of which are terrific, ‘Portrait de Tchouiko’ in particular) she takes stock of contemporary developments and is brazen with her quotations: rich colour from Matisse, blue hues from Picasso, the exotic — and the erotic — from Gauguin. Her short-lived marriage to the gay art collector Wilhelm Uhde may well have been platonic, but it provided fertile soil for Sonia’s career. Through Uhde, she took part in an exhibition that featured work by Braque, Picasso, Derain and Dufy. He also introduced her to Robert Delaunay. Two years later, she divorced Uhde, married Delaunay and her days as a beard were over.

There are a number of points in the show where the attempt to sideline Robert feels unnatural.

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