Sonia Delaunay, 'Living Profoundly'.

This essay examines Sonia Delaunay's efforts to promote her simultaneous dresses made in 1913–14. Departing from traditional art‐historical accounts which treat Robert Delaunay's simultanism as a painterly, modernist practice, I situate Sonia Delaunay's fashions and her attendant publicity as an avant‐gardist move from art into life. Throughout, the essay traces how Delaunay strategically photographed herself wearing her dresses and promoted the circulation of such photographs within the popular and avant‐garde press as a means of generating visibility and attention for herself as a (woman) artist. Highlighting the gendered constraints that originally led her to the applied arts, the essay ultimately argues that Delaunay offers an early and alternative art‐into‐life narrative of the avant‐garde: one in which a woman artist embraces the everyday and the decorative arts only to turn that embrace into a highly visible, public, and sellable production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]