Sonia Delaunay

(1885 – 1979)

Jean Planque first met Sonia Delaunay in the mid 1950s and at once felt at home in her work – a work that has broken entirely free from figurative representation. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not experience abstraction as a result of a painful abandonment of a tradition dominated by illusionism. Her Eastern European background and memories of her childhood in the Ukraine gave her an early and evidently quite natural access to the language of colors, and she was thus able handle them with ease throughout her career. Using pure colors, which she regarded as expressions of primal energy, she succeeded in creating planes and rhythms that structure the picture surface and create tonal relationships ranging from hot to cold, soft to sharp. Jean Planque admired her manifold inventiveness and acquired several of her works in her studio at an early date.