Un Égyptien Dansant

Watercolour on paper, signed and inscribed lower right. A costume design for Cléopâtre, the Ballets Russes production staged by Diaghilev in London in 1918, for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes and Robert Delaunay the sets. The commission came during the couple’s years in Spain and Portugal, and it was the work that brought Sonia’s colour theory out of painting and onto the stage for the first time. The dancer is shown mid-movement, the figure drawn rapidly and the costume worked up in flat, unmodelled colour: a blue and red skirt built from interlocking arcs, with a black disc at the hip. The forms follow the principle Sonia and Robert called Simultanism — that adjacent contrasting colours generate movement by optical interaction alone. Designing for a body in motion suited the theory exactly, and the Cléopâtre costumes are generally regarded as the point where her applied work began to lead her painting rather than follow it.