Linford, SarahGianni, IlariaOmelinska, Yaroslava2024-05-302024-05-302020Omelinska, Yaroslava. "Sonia Delaunay: from Muse, Designer, Wife to Artist Sara Stern". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2020.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/72Thesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Fall 2020.The reception of Sonia Delaunay’s work has been distorted and undervalued due to her social position as the wife of a famous artist, her ethnicity, her gender, and her choice of media. The primary literature documenting her life and practice presents a male perspective on her art: first, that of her husband, then of the male representatives of the Parisian bohème, and then of male art critics and scholars. As a result, Sonia Delaunay was not the author of her own history. Instead, her history was written for her by her male colleagues in the art world, resulting in numerous misinterpretations and depreciative stereotypes. Thus, the historiography that established our current perception of Sonia Delaunay’s work is overloaded with biases both in the academic literature and in the curatorial practices of exhibiting her work. This thesis aims to analyze the origins of these recurring patterns and to provide solutions to overcome the dead-ends in historiography and museum practices. Using a post-modernist and post-feminist methodology, this research attempts to revise the existing literature from the 1910s to the 2020s to provide a new reading of Sonia Delaunay’s work, free of biases, stereotypes, and distortions. The main goal was to secure Sonia Delaunay’s proper place in art history. The research resulted in rethinking her complex artistic cooperation with her husband, the use of her ethnicity as a way of integrating French society and concealing her Jewish origins, and her prescient reservations about being relegated to the essentialist category of ‘female artist.’85 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Sonia DelaunayModern artThesis