In Sonia Delaunay: A Life of Color an artist takes her young son on a fanciful journey to help him understand the many ways of experiencing color. In her multicolored car they enter a landscape made of the hues and shapes of her artworks. They visit a dance hall in Paris, an outdoor market in Portugal, and a department store in Amsterdam. At each stop her son encounters new sounds, sights, and feelings—irresistibly catchy music, a bright tomato, a pair of silk pajamas—and eventually comes to understand how these sensations combine in his mother’s art and permeate every aspect of her life.

 

Charles’s mother is Sonia Delaunay, who in the early 1910s, together with her husband, Robert, proposed the bold idea that instead of depicting people, places, and things as they appeared in real life, they would reflect the modern world by capturing its colors, shapes, sounds, and movements. This book, which incorporates four vivid, full-color plates of Sonia’s work from the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, brings her most fundamental ideas about art and life into focus for young readers. 40 pp.; illustrated throughout.