Sonia Delaunay was a French artist, fashion innovator and designer. Born in Russia in 1885, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany before moving to Paris in 1905 to continue at the Académie de la Palette in Montparnasse.

After divorcing art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, she married French artist Robert Delaunay in 1910. Together they co-founded the Orphism movement, named in 1913 by poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a development of Cubism based on strong colour and geometric forms.

Delaunay spent most of her working life in Paris. Her retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, was the first by a living female artist. The following year, she was named an officer of the French Legion of Honour.

Sonia Delaunay’s collaboration with Atelier Mourlot helped carry her ideas about colour and rhythm into print at a moment when her work was being reassessed beyond fashion and design. Lithography proved a natural extension of her theory of Simultanism, allowing complex colour contrasts to be built up with clarity and precision. Working with Mourlot enabled her to translate a language developed across painting, textiles and applied art into a medium that could circulate more widely. These prints reinforced her belief that abstraction belonged in everyday life, not just the studio or gallery, and played a part in securing her later recognition as a major modern artist in her own right.