Joseph Nechvatal reviews Sonia Delaunay: Les couleurs de l’abstraction at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, on view through February 22, 2015.

Nechvatal writes: "In our period of the rampant merging of art and fashion, it is refreshing to revisit where this hybridization more or less began … The show illustrates the fertile uniqueness of Sonia Delaunay by stressing her sustained dialogue with simultanisme even as she takes on the connection of art and technology by shuffling back and forth between various art forms. Her consistency of formal research, based in the synthetic, makes this show especially pertinent to our time… In our time, where many contemporary power artists have disgustingly worked for luxury brands, a move that has, in effect, revealed the high-end art market itself as a luxury goods business, Sonia Delaunay’s show was particularly revealing of the importance of scale. The connection between art and fashion, in-and-of-itself, is not very problematic (nor very major). It is the exploitation of that connection, on the global corporate scale, that chafes."