Sonia Delaunay and the Invention of the 'Art Car'

[Originally published in The Automobile magazine.  For a copy of the Sept. 2024 issue, click here]

The need for Art is surely older than the need for Speed, and painted evidence of nomadic artisans afoot chasing down game 30,000 years ago remains as testament to a hard life without wheels. Or perhaps, the possibility of art was available, while speed per se had to wait for the taming of the horse. When the wheel finally arrived, it was immediately decorated; carts and chariots became a canvas for expression – personal or divine.  When the automobile appeared, the tradition of horse-drawn coachbuilding carried on, because looking smart in your wheels has always been a priority. Some of that work is exquisite, but is it art? That’s a sticking point, as battle lines were drawn in 19th Century French académies between the ‘Fine Art’ versus ‘Craft’ and ‘Decoration’. That line is finally dissolving, as artists expand their oeuvre from painting or sculpture to include design.  For example, the fake Donald Judd dining set crassly shown off by Kim Kardashian, that earned her a lawsuit from Judd’s estate.  Since everyone is an artist these days (per Marcel Duchamp), how do we differentiate between art hobbyists decorating their cars, and famous artists being commissioned to decorate cars?

Art Car vs ‘art car’: defining the term

There is a difference between ‘art cars’ and Art Cars. One is a thriving and popular form of expression using vehicles as an artistic medium, practiced the world over since the origin of the wheel.  The umbrella term ‘art car’ thus includes many important genres, like the ‘custom culture’ car scene originating in the late 1940s, the historically deep Low Rider scene in the USA, the insane Indonesian Vespa cult (where through metal mitosis scooters are transformed into 20- or 30-wheeled living platforms), as well as the psychedelic vehicles emerging in the 1960s.  Hippie cars lingered and became the so-called ‘art car’ movement, as documented by Harrod Blank in the 1992 film Wild Wheels, and the 1997 book ‘Art Cars’ (Ineri Foundation). Blank co-founded the Art Car Fest, with art car parades became a thing in the US; in India there’s the Cartist festival, with extravagant lorries assaulting all the senses, all at once. There’s even an Art Car Manifesto (1997, James Haritas), a must for any popular art movement: “The art car is… transforming the automobile into a potent new personal symbol.”  In sum, the art car movement is enormous, popular, and global. But I’m not addressing any of those scenes here, which in retrospect make the Art Car movement look very small, and very elitist. Which it is.

For the sake of The Automobile, let’s define the Art Car as an automotive extension of the ‘fine art’ world, where recognized artists are invited to apply their genius to car bodies. It was BMW who made the term popular starting in 1975, when they commissioned Alexander Calder to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL Batmobile for Hervé Poulain to race at LeMans in Group 2. For context, this was a one-up on what Porsche was already doing at Le Mans, first with their psychedelic Martini-917 in 1970, then with the ‘Pink Pig’ 917 in 1971.  These Porsches were not, according to our definition, Art Cars, not being painted by a recognized artist (the schemes were laid out by Anatole Lapin, Porsche’s Chief Designer). The 1975 Calder-BMW was to become the first in a continuing string of BMW Art Cars, painted by big names like Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, whose 1979 BMW M1 just might be the most valuable automobile in the world, painted with his actual hands. BMW continues the tradition, having commissioned 20 Art Cars to date.

But the first BMW Art Car of 1975 was not the origin of the Art Car genre: that was created 50 years earlier, in Paris.  How Sonia Delaunay was tailor-made for the invention of the Art Car requires an understanding of her significance as a pioneering artist of multiple mediums.  That she oversaw not one but three Art Cars over a 50-year span makes her a titan of the movement.  Her work is so strongly identified with Art Cars that cars by other designers have been mis-attributed as Delaunays…especially when the automobile brand is Delaunay, but we’ll get to that.

The Delaunays invent abstraction

Sonia Delaunay was born Sofia Stern in Odessa (1885) to poor Jewish parents, and was orphaned by age 5.  She was adopted by her wealthy and childless uncle Henri Terk of St. Petersburg, and re-dubbed Sonia Terk. At 16, a teacher noted her artistic brilliance, so she was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany.  In 1905 she convinced her adoptive parents to allow her to study at the Académie de La Palette in Paris for a summer.  Paris was the center of the artistic universe, and she begged to return. The Terks wanted her in Russia and married, at which point she could take her inheritance; two apartment buildings in St. Petersburg providing ample income.

Sonia returned to Paris anyway, and married art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, with whom she was close but not romantically involved: she was his ‘beard’.  Her trust fund thus vested, her income was sufficient for a lavish Bohemian lifestyle.  She concentrated on her art, meeting everyone of importance through Uhde’s gallery, and quickly met a vivacious young artist and fell in love: “In Robert Delaunay I found a poet. A poet who wrote not with words but with colours.” The pair married in 1910, and hosted a regular salon, entertaining the entirety of avant-garde Paris; artists, writers, and composers busy inventing modern art.  Robert Delaunay was a gifted theorist focused on developing a new language of painting based on color, which both he and Sonia explored on canvas. They called their color experiments simultanéisme, where two different colors/designs placed together affect both at once, in an expanded version of Seurat’s color-dot theory, and decades in advance of Josef Albers’ pedagogy. Both Delaunays produced exceptional artworks between 1910-14, as radical as anything painted in the period, which was choc-a-bloc with future one-name legends like Picasso, Cocteau, Kandinsky, Apollinaire, Diaghalev, etc.

It has been argued that the first intentionally abstract artwork of the 20^th Century was a baby blanket Sonia Delaunay made for their son Charles. “About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son…a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants…the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions, and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”  The Delaunays recognized the implications of this object, a painting-sized rectangle sewn from various colors and textures. It was the intuitive end-run necessary to subvert their classical art training. The Delaunays would trademark the word ‘Simultané’ for Sonia’s business in the 1920s, and it’s an apt term for their careers, as in 1911 many artists were struggling towards a justifiable abstract painting, something that made sense to their milieu of fellow artists, critics, and collectors.  Robert Delaunay was a gifted theorist and a superb painter, but it was Sonia who made the breakthroughs, perhaps because she didn’t overthink her process, and simply got on with making art, and when necessary, bent her art to earn money.

The advent of war in 1914 spoiled the party.  The Delaunays were in Spain when the war commenced, and saw no reason to return, so didn’t: the scent of ‘deserter’ hung about Robert, who took three years to appear at a draft board. When the Russian Revolution cut off Sonia’s income, she was forced to steer her art practice towards earning a living, applying her extraordinarily appealing artwork – abstract circles, soft geometry, bold colors – in a variety of media, from costume and interior design to ceramics and fabrics.  Her first commercial gig was designing costumes for fellow Russian expat Serge Diaghilev’s ‘Cleopatra’, which were stunning and defined Art Deco theatrical fashion. She soon opened Casa Sonia in Madrid as a new concept – a lifestyle boutique selling interior design and fashion – that was a huge hit with the wealthy and aristocratic. In 1920 the Delaunays returned to Paris, where they resumed a weekly salon, and Sonia opened a full-fledged fashion house, Maison Sonia.  She adapted the boldness of her art to her clothing, making it avant-garde and perfectly of the moment. “To wear Sonia Delaunay was not, like wearing Chanel, to adopt a ‘look’. It was to make a statement,” noted her biographer Axel Madsen (‘Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation’, Open Road 1989).

Paris 1925: The Art Deco exposition

Maison Sonia boomed as a frenetic postwar spirit spilled over into modern art, design and decoration.  In 1924/5, journalist Maurice Kaplan begged her friend Sonia Delaunay to apply one of her abstract designs to Kaplan’s charming new runabout, an Ariés 5-8hp Torpedo 3-seat boat-tail convertible. Sonia provided a pattern of rectangular color blocks in green, gray and black, in the mode of her copyrighted Simultané fabrics. Sonia was at this time financial partners with Jacques Heim, who invested 500,000 francs to establish Ateliers Simultanés – a nod to the Delaunays’ art theory – as a storefront studio, with Sonia-designed fabrics, knitwear, furs, handbags, scarves, and shoes, all of which were a runaway success. Her bold abstract patterns were particularly suited to the fashions of the 1920s, as their lack of waistline and minimal tailoring were suitable for any body size or shape, a concept familiar today to fans of Comme des Garçons or Marni. Sonia even produced special clothing for automobilists and their passengers, and surviving examples include a set of four embroidered cloche hats for the daughters of her friends Jean and Annette Coutrot.

Maurice Kaplan’s automotive inspiration was perfectly timed for the April 1925 opening of the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, where Maison Sonia had a kiosk.  Jacques Heim seized the opportunity to pose the car in front of Robert Mallet-Stevens’ modernist tourism pavilion (with Robert Delaunay murals inside), posing two models in Sonia’s clothing: color-block coats with an embroidered driving cap and cloche hat.  Sonia’s timeless patterns, the adorable Ariés runabout, and the modernist building simultaneously combined in vibrating resonance, and were proof that Sonia’s art could be applied to anything. That Exposition photo summarizes everything that was chic about Paris in the interwar Art Deco era, the Roaring 20s.  It also, to my mind, featured the world’s first Art Car.

The Art Car as an idea

There was a contemporary context for Sonia’s Art Car in the aesthetic tumult of Art Deco Paris: the idea of an automobile painted with abstract patterns was already afoot. In 1923 the luxury automobile brand Delaunay-Belleville, est. 1904 by Louis Delaunay (whose unrelated surname sowed much confusion later), commissioned five well-known graphic artists to paint sample color schemes for cars, as an ‘essai sur les differentes manières de les carrosier’. The artists included Georges Lepape, Eduardo Garcia Benito, René Lelong, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, and Charles Martin.  The resulting catalogue is exquisite and beautifully printed by Draeger in Paris (still in business). The proposed paint schemes are exuberantly Art Deco, and remarkably similar to each other, all using abstract geometric patterns in multiple colors. To my knowledge no customer ever actually ordered such a car, but even as an ‘ideal’ concept (so popular in the 20^th Century motor magazines), such color applications were perhaps too flambouyant for the average wealthy automobilist.

Georges LePape continued his exploration of the theme at the end of 1924, supplying the cover for the first London edition of Vogue (January 1925), featuring a chic woman standing beside a Voisin, both in matching Art Deco patterns. Given the fame of Sonia Delaunay’s geometric art and fabrics, in a roundabout way she inspired the creation of her own Art Car: Maurice Kaplan must have seen LePape’s illustrations, which were surely informed by Delaunay’s work. When Kaplan’s runabout was completed, it was the talk of Paris as the chicest car on the planet. In later years, it was assumed that LePape’s Vogue cover featured a Sonia Delaunay car and outfit, but no! The misunderstanding even inspired the owner of a Voisin in the 2000s to paint it up as an homage to Sonia Delaunay, and it is in a way, but is actually LePape’s color scheme.

For archive-diggers there are yet more mis-attributions of Art Deco paint schemes as by Sonia Delaunay, including two Citroens exhibited at concours d’elegance in Paris, 1930 and ’31.  A Citroen C4 Faux-Convertible in the 1930 concours had been painted in random-sized bubbles of various colors as an Art Deco Wonder Bread sedan.  And Jacque-Henri Lartique photographed a Citroen C6F Faux-Convertible in 1931, wearing a flash of abstract pattern on its doors. It is rumored that one or both cars were sponsored by Val-Spar paints, but any Deco-era car on the popular radar gets attributed to Sonia, regardless of actual provenance, such is the power of that promotional image from the 1925 Expo.

Photographs of Kaplan’s Ariés do not reveal if the interior was upholstered in Delaunay/Heim fabrics, but she did apply that great idea to her own car (or rather, Robert’s, since she did not drive).  In 1922 the Delaunays had been forced by financial distress to sell Henri Rousseau’s naif masterpiece ‘The Snake Charmer’ (now at the Musée d’Orsay) for 50,000 francs.  Flush with cash, Robert purchased an elegant Talbot 67 convertible, to which was applied Sonia’s patterned fabric in a multi-colored diamond pattern.  The details of that fabric are unknown; Heim did not produce heavy cloth for automotive upholstery, and it’s possible the Talbot was a one-off.  Nor do we know for certain what year it was installed: before or after Kaplan’s Ariés?

The Crash and the War

The 1920s were great financially for the Delaunays, but not the ‘30s. When the Crash hit Europe in 1930, the high-end fashion business dried up.  The decision to close Atelier Simultanés meant she had to lay off 30 workers, and give up their apartment.  Once again they were poor artists relying on Sonia’s ingenuity to survive, but she called the mid-to-late 1930s her ‘freedom years,’ without the pressure of a fashion line, storefront, or employees. She still designed fabrics for Jacques Heim, took on interior design and graphic art jobs, and painted. For the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques, she and Robert both got commissions for enormous murals, which was a shot in the arm.

The Delaunays were late to respond to the German advance on Paris in 1940, and joined the stream of refugees fleeing south as the sound of heavy artillery drew closer. They ended up in Auvergne, where Robert developed cancer of the bowel, and died by 1941. Sonia, born a Russian Jewess with enough name changes (from adoption and two marriages) to hide her origins, spent the war secluded in the Vichy south, in an isolated farmhouse with Jean and Sophia Taeuber-Arp, whose work on fabrics at the Bauhaus placed her career very close to Sonia’s.  After Robert’s death, Sonia was determined to defend and bolster his legacy.

Sonia Delaunay’s tireless promotion of Robert’s work, and her determination to only sell to museums the 100 paintings she’d squirreled away during the war, meant that Robert’s legacy as a founding pioneer of abstract art was secure.  Such unsung devotion was the norm for an ‘art wife’, and typically women artists were overshadowed by their husbands’ legacies for decades – think Lee Krassner, Elaine DeKooning, and Frida Kahlo, all of whom were re-appraised after their deaths, and Frida became a wildly popular cult figure.  But Sonia was still alive, and spent the next 40 years developing her career.  Even in the 1950s, as she sought to place Robert’s art in the right institutions, observant curators couldn’t help but notice her paintings were every bit as good as his.  She began to re-evaluate her own career, questioning all those conversations and years of painting side by side with Robert: how many of those big ideas were actually hers?  And, by the late 1950s, Sonia Delaunay was rediscovered, celebrated, exhibited, and popular all over again. In 1965 she was given a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre, the first living female artist to be so honored, and only the second living artist, after Georges Braque in 1961.

Charity calls, Part 1: the Matra 530

In an echo of the 1924 Delaunay-Belleville Art Car pamphlet, in early 1967 Sonia Delaunay was chosen for an exhibition of artist-decorated cars entitled ‘Cinq voitures personnalisées par cinq artistes contemporains’ (five cars personalized by five contemporary artists), organized by the arts and culture magazine Réalités. The cars were to be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the Fondation pour la recherche médicale. Four of the artists were pioneers of the Op Art style emerging in the 1960s, including Victory Vasarély, whose bulging dot paintings were the dilated-pupil grandchildren of the Delaunays’ discs. But without Sonia’s decades of design work under his belt, Vasarely’s strips of reflective mylar dots randomly applied to an Opel Kadett are simply – there is no other word for it – awful. The artist Arman (Armand Fernandez) covered a 1961 Renault 4L with 819 decals of…a Renault 4L. “The 819 Renaults lined up on the body symbolise the theme of accumulation.” Indeed. Carlos Cruz-Diez transformed a Daf 33 into a ‘Physichromobile’, using carefully measured vertical lines of different colors on both the bodywork and windows, arranged to produce visual after-effects in the viewer’s eyes. Yaacov Agam’s work was simplier, with his Simca 1000 featuring large, simple blocks of color, and was the most appealing of the younger artists’ work for the auction.  Yet it was the 81-year old Sonia Delaunay who stole the show, and created an enduring work of art – her second Art Car.

The French firm Matra (Mécanique Aviation Traction) had only begun making automobiles in 1964, after taking over manufacture of the Bonnet Djet, the world’s first production mid-engine road car.  As a follow-up, Matra introduced the M530 Sports in 1967 as a 2+2 sports coupé with a mid-mount Ford 1699cc V-4 engine, a targa roof, and avant-garde styling.  Marcel Chassagny, founder of the Société des engines Matra, and his nephew Jean Tabourin, leaped at the chance to offer Sonia Delaunay, fresh off her Louvre retrospective, their new model to decorate.  Unlike her first Art Car, Sonia’s sketches, notes, correspondence, and color specs for her Matra survive, and give us a glimpse into her process. She hesitated at first, but “When I saw the car, I was won over. I imagined the poem I could create by applying the language of color without breaking the forms of the car.” Her correspondence shows a mature approach to the project: “As I am careful, I did not want my Matra, once in motion, to attract the attention of other drivers to the point of causing accidents by distraction. Also, I made sure that the colors, in motion, blend into a blue barely brighter than the initial blue of the car.” Her understanding of the brief imply that the car would be used, and possibly even produced in series.  After all, Sonia’s work in every medium had been popular in the past, she was at a second peak of her career, and Matra needed a sales boost, so the possibility of production was not out of the question.  But the Delaunay Matra 530 would remain a one-off Art Car.

Regardless, Sonia Delaunay’s Matra was a smash.  It’s the only one of the cinq voitures remembered today, and was included that year in yet another career retrospective, this time at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris.  It was also featured on the cover of Moteurs magazine (Jan/Feb 1968), and reproduced in 1:43 scale by two model companies, Bizarre (1967) and JPS Miniatures (1968) – one of which sits on my desk. In 1972 the car was pulled from the Matra museum for the exciting opening scene in the documentary ‘Sonia Delaunay: Footage for a Monograph’, directed by her assistant Patrick Raynaud, in which we can at last see (and hear) a Delaunay car in motion. The Sonia Delaunay Matra 530 is the only one of her Art Cars that survives today (it can be viewed at the Cité de l’Automobile in Mulhouse), but it was not her last.

Charity calls, Part 2: Sonia’s final Art Car

In 1973, Sonia – nearly 90 – was again invited to create a color scheme for a car, in this case a Bugatti T35, supplied to her as a 1:8 scale model by Jean-Paul Fontenelle.  The model would be sold at auction to benefit the Bal des petits lits blancs, a children’s hospital charity, and had been organized by Artcurial and Hervé Poulain.  The Bugatti T35 was an inspired choice as the perfect 1920s canvas for Sonia’s artwork, and her concept was arguably the best of her three Art Cars, with its colors arranged in bold, colorful roundels against blocks of color in blue, white, red, and green, very much in line with her graphic work over the previous 20 years.  The model would have remained just that, a mock-up, had not the imaginative owner of an actual Bugatti T35, Marc Nicolosi, been inspired to make it real. Nicolosi asked his friend Hervé Poulain for permission from Sonia Delaunay to use the color scheme on his car.  Her consent is preserved by the Nicolosi family in a letter of 3 October 1977: “I put one condition on this agreement, which is that the production be submitted to me before the words ‘after Sonia Delaunay’ are added.” Marc’s son Baptiste Nicolosi continues the tale: “Sadly, my father did not paint the Bugatti in the 1970s, and Sonia died soon after (1979). At the beginning of the 1990s he still wanted to do the paint scheme, so he contacted the owner of the model, asking ‘can you loan me the model so that I copy the paint scheme?’ He said yes, but we could keep the paint scheme ‘only for five years’. We pushed it a little bit, like 6 or seven years, but in the end my father put it back to gray.”

Luckily, the ‘after Sonia Delaunay’ Bugatti T35 was extensively photographed in its brief, glorious existence, so we can appreciate her finest Art Car of all. While her 1925 Ariés was a fashion statement, and her 1965 Matra cheekily sensible, the Bugatti hews closest to Sonia’s art, the famous ‘discs’ that she and Robert explored from 1912 onwards that became a Delaunay signature.  When asked about the public’s response to the Delaunay Bugatti in real life, Baptiste opines, “Some people hated it, and some people loved it. It definitely provoked a reaction.”

That might have been an epitaph for Sonia Delaunay’s career, except that her work was so incredibly popular for much of her lifetime, and beyond. Her reputation as a significant artist of the 20^th Century is assured, but Robert’s paintings still sell for a lot more, and despite the collaborative nature of their early work, it was simply assumed by a sexist culture that Robert’s career was more important.  But the times they are a’changin’. The former epithet ‘woman artist’ has become the doorway for new scholarship and reappraisal, in both the halls of academe and in popular consciousness. Today it is Sonia Delaunay who gets the lion’s share of exhibitions, as a new generation discovers her remarkable career, with revelatory museum exhibits like the recent ‘Sonia Delaunay: Living Art’ at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. When asked directly about Delaunay’s relationship to the Art Car, Waleria Dorogova (co-curator of the Bard exhibit) reflected, “Sonia would really love to have been the inventor of the so-called Art Car, I think that would appeal to her greatly. She didn’t plan to be a leader in anything at all, but everything came very naturally to her.”  It seems equally natural, then, to anoint Sonia Delaunay the founder of the Art Car lineage, as the first to apply her art to an automobile.

Special thanks to the curators of the Bard Graduate Center’s ‘Sonia Delaunay: Living Art’ exhibit, Laura Microulis and Waleria Dorogova, and to New York Public Library photo curator Deirdre Donohue, for their generous time and input for this article.  Also to Baptiste Nicolosi for sharing his family archive, and Stefan Marjoram for his brilliant illustrations.