Sonia Delaunay-Terk, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (detail), 1913. Illustrated book with pochoir, case: 80 x 17 in. (203.2 x 43.2 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, 2016.15.4.1

Paris 1913: “La Prose du Transsibérien” and the Flowering of the Avant-Garde

By 1913, Paris had been for more than a decade the epicenter of artistic revolution in Europe. That year, artist Sonia Delaunay and poet Blaise Cendrars collaborated on La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. Hailed as the first “simultaneous book,” the artwork was conceived as a unified experience of text and image, indivisible and apprehended concurrently. The emergence of an avant-garde art across all media was nowhere more in evidence than in such collaborations between poets and visual artists. This exhibition examines the artistic milieu that surrounded La Prose in the years before and after its creation, a period that set the stage for the flowering of the arts in Paris in the 1920s.

Stories

Currently on view