The woman who danced her way to abstraction

On Thursday evenings in the months before the outbreak of World War I, Sonia Delaunay-Terk would go dancing at a nightclub in Paris called Le Bal Bullier. Dressed in colorful, crazy-looking clothes of her own design, she and her friends would do the fox trot and the tango, which were all the rage.

Delaunay-Terk was already an experienced artist. Born Sarah Stern in 1885, she was the daughter of factory workers from Odessa, Ukraine. At age 5, she was placed in the care of Heinrich Terk, a well-off relative in St. Petersburg who liked to collect art.

Terk saw to it that Sonia (she assumed the name as a child) got a proper education. Since she showed an interest in art, she went to Germany to study drawing at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts, then moved to Paris in 1905. That was the year Matisse painted “Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line” and “Woman With a Hat,” the scandalous portraits of his wife that, by liberating color from description, became the opening salvos of the 20th-century avant-garde.

When she got home from Le Bal Bullier, Delaunay-Terk (who died in 1979) began a series of works on paper based on the movements of dancers. “One was accustomed to see a dancer represented in a photo-pose, in an arrested movement,” she later explained. “I broke with this convention by superimposing her attitudes [i.e. poses]. Light and movement were confounded, the planes were scrambled together. The rhythms made us want to make the colors dance.”

Delaunay-Terk’s parents didn’t like where her artistic interests were leading her and tried to call her home. She avoided that fate by marrying the gay art dealer Wilhelm Uhde in 1908. (Picasso painted Uhde’s portrait in his freshly hatched cubist idiom in 1910.) Delaunay-Terk showed her own work at Uhde’s gallery, where she met Robert Delaunay, a modern painter who was developing color theories that were to prove enormously influential on the first generation of abstract painters.

After divorcing Uhde, Sonia married Delaunay, and the two formed an enormously influential creative partnership along the lines of such other avant-garde couples as Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp, and Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

This painting by Delaunay-Terk, with its Cezannesque lozenges of colored paint arranged in a wheeling, quiltlike pattern of circles and sinuous curves, is in the collection of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One in a series she titled “Electric Prisms,” it was painted in 1913, which makes it a very early example of modernist abstraction.

Modern art’s drive toward abstraction has always been described in terms of music, and that’s of course right. But Delaunay-Terk’s work reminds us that dance and even fashion were also important.

And so, perhaps, was a feeling — the feeling you got on a Thursday night when you dressed up, went out with your girlfriends, flirted, danced and enjoyed the way bodies, colored fabrics and indoor lights all moved together on a crowded dance floor in Montparnasse.

It’s often at nightclubs, after all, that young people feel most liberated from parents and teachers and bosses and all the strictures of the workaday world. And liberation is what abstraction was all about.

The Delaunays and their fellow pioneers of abstraction spoke of the world of appearances as akin to a veil covering a deeper spiritual world. They wanted to tear that veil. And just as followers of the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg linked his attempt to “emancipate dissonance” with a wider social emancipation, early abstract artists believed that liberating line and color from the duties of describing real objects might help everyone gain access to a deeper spiritual reality. In this way, abstract art might emancipate society.

It’s crushing to think that, as Sonia and her friends danced in Montparnasse, politicians and generals were studying railway lines, choreographing troop movements and preparing to sanction the murder of 10 million young men.