La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France)

At the outbreak of the First World War, Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert decided to move to Spain, settling in Madrid, where she developed a close relationship with figures such as Vicente Huidobro and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Her motifs of inspiration came from the cafés, streets and popular culture.

Meanwhile, the intense light in the Spanish Peninsula led her to conduct a more in-depth study of light, movement and the way to perceive colours, a concern that had started years previous and crystallised in so-called Simultanism, associated with urban progress. This current, which stemmed from Cubism, was based on colour contrasts and formal dynamism, characteristics that would appear in the collaborative artist’s book La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose on the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), described by the poet Blaise Cendrars as the “first simultaneous book” in reference to its visual appearance. The work recounts Cendrars’ journey by rail from Moscow to the Sea of Japan in 1904, accompanied by the pictorial motifs of Sonia Delaunay — forms and colours which, along with its unique fold-out format, suggest movement and modernity.

During the years she spent in Spain, Delaunay would apply these investigations and plastic elements chiefly to the field of advertising, the creation of theatre staging and fashion and interior design, undertakings that would lead her to found the boutique Casa Sonia in Madrid.



Joaquín Merlos Isidro