Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern

Sonia Delaunay retrospective at Tate Modern

For Sonia Delaunay, the pram in the hall was not the enemy of art but the catalyst for one of the most adeptly managed careers of the 20th century. In 1911, when her son was a few months old, Delaunay took a break from painting to make him a cradle cover in a patchwork style, imitating in textiles the juxtaposition of strong conflicting colours and geometric shapes with which her husband Robert was experimenting on canvas.

Through the rest of their lives, while Robert conceptualised abstraction as a universal language, Sonia kept the family afloat by putting it into practice as commercial design, in clothes, quilts, shoes, bookbindings, prints and advertising posters. Her Citroen car, painted in multicoloured blocks, became a Jazz Age icon; its 1960s Op Art successor, a Matra 530 in turquoise and grey panels with a red roof, appeared when Delaunay was 82.

At the centre of Tate Modern's new retrospective is a gallery resembling a vast fashion showroom. There are swathes of zigzagging silk and spiralling cotton; a crepe-de-Chine harlequin jacket and a woollen coat of interlocking rust-red and camel-brown rectangles made for the actress Gloria Swanson; a bathing tunic embroidered with lozenge shapes plus a parasol to match. Scrolls of ever-changing fabric in an animated window display, patented by Robert in 1924, confuse and enchant the eye as vibrating colours and patterns printed on silk are enhanced by the machine's movement.

Sketches experiment with rainbow-hued spinning-top outfits and sugar-pink soap-bubble dresses. A photograph of their apartment at 19 Boulevard Malesherbes shows the Delaunays living in a three-dimensional razzle-dazzle collage: sycamore marquetry, printed velvet curtains, furniture upholstered in criss-cross tapestry. "I have lived my art," Delaunay said. "For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called decorative work."

Today, she presses every contemporary button. She was an indefatigable female artist who crossed disciplines, blurred distinctions between life and art and established a global brand that declared allegiance to both local chic and cultural diversity. Though sparked by Ecole de Paris modernism, Delaunay's designs also referenced the strident colours and primitivism of the folk art remembered from her Ukrainian childhood, and so fed the French craze for Russian exoticism.

Tate's exhaustive show chronicles a story of adaptation and survival. Delaunay was born Sara Stern in a Jewish family in Gradizhsk in 1885, and became Sonia Terk in 1890 when a rich uncle adopted her and brought her up as a cosmopolitan in St Petersburg. She was given her first paints by German Impressionist Max Liebermann, and studied in Karlsruhe and Paris. Gallerist Wilhelm Uhde promoted her in Germany and Paris; she briefly became Sonia Uhde in 1908 in a mariage blanc which allowed her to stay in the French capital and which concealed Uhde's homosexuality.

Indebted to Van Gogh and Gauguin, her first paintings - "Philomene", "Sleeping Girl" and "Finnish Woman" from 1907 - are bright, simplified portraits in bold outlines set on flattened decorative grounds: the 1900s avant-garde house style.

"Yellow Nude" (1908) is more distinctive. The chunky, angular prostitute with mask-like face and black stockings is harsh and lacking sensuality. It is a crude version of the Brucke aesthetic of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and acknowledges Delaunay's training in German, not French, pictorial modernity. The warm orange-yellow hues of the body in relation to the green-blue cushions recall the loud chromatic play of the early Russian avant-garde. But the jagged shapes of the harem decor prefigure the chevrons and stripes which would become Delaunay's signature, and announce her instinct for design.

The following year she began her romance with Robert Delaunay. His engagement present was his first Eiffel Tower painting, suggestively inscribed "Movement Depth France Russia". She divorced Uhde, married Delaunay in 1910, and developed with him the theory they named "Simultaneism": abstract compositions whose dynamic contrasting colours create a sense of movement. The fragments of circles and spheres in "Electric Prisms" (1914) and the curving forms evoking a frieze of whirling dancers in the four-metre "Le Bal Bullier" (1913), exhibited alongside the "Simultaneous" patchwork dress which she wore to the ball, are high points of Delaunay's painting. It was never, however, as refined or radiant as that of her husband at his pre-1914 best.

Her most innovative piece from these years is the collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars on the "simultaneous" unfurling book "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian". Patches of colour and text are interwoven to be read and viewed simultaneously, imitating the prismatic reality of a new urban life characterised by electric lighting, cars and express trains. Whether Cendrars and Delaunay had actually experienced the Trans-Siberian Express did not matter, wrote a contemporary critic; the point was that they "made us all take it".

Delaunay's boast that "I am ahead of Picasso and Braque. I am not just analysing geometric forms, I'm trying to come to grips with the rhythm of modern life," is nonsense. Simultaneism, with its roots in Divisionism and Post-Impressionism, was formally dependent on the waves of Cubism and Futurism sweeping Paris. Inspiration from the Delaunays' years of exile during the first world war in the Iberian peninsula - Sonia painted flamenco dancers and "Portuguese Market", where fruit shapes are semi-abstracted into ornamental patterns - sustained the style. But by the time the couple returned to Paris in 1920 from what Sonia called their "summer holidays", the expressive energy of their works on canvas had gone.

So had their private income, which was derived from Sonia's family estates in Russia and cut off abruptly by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Robert's paintings did not sell. But Sonia threw herself into the fashion business, which this show documents with flair. A lone painting stands out from these years - "Simultaneous Dresses (The three women)" (1925). The Three Graces as fashionable, faceless goddesses in Sonia's recognisable designs are set in a deco interior.

Robert died in 1941. Sonia returned to abstract geometric painting in the three decades before her own death, aged 94, with results that are formulaic, dull and as with all her work, lacking any self-doubt or hint of struggle.

But in the applied arts, that confidence and lack of introspection produced spectacular results: while her paintings are heavy and fussy, her fabrics float, soar and celebrate the new model of independence and freedom pioneered by her generation of women.

'Sonia Delaunay', Tate Modern, London, to August 9, tate.org.uk

Slideshow photographs: Jean-Philippe Charbonnier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris / Pracusa; Private Collection / Pracusa; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid / Pracusa; Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes / Pracusa; Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden / Pracusa; Tim Ireland/AP; Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris

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