SUBVERTING ORIENTALISM AND PRIMITIVISM? SONIA DELAUNAY'S YELLOW NUDE, 1908

In this thesis, I demonstrate that Yellow Nude includes a number of pointed references to historic stereotypes and contemporaneous tropes that embroil the artist’s identity in the primitivist ideologies she apparently appropriates. I first identify the background design within the painting as that of a turn of the century ikat textile, with Central Asian, Jewish, and Russian production histories that mimic the biographic transnationality of Delaunay herself. Delaunay therefore invites viewers to conflate the figure in the painting with the woman who made it, capitalizing on the perceived “exoticism” of her “primitive” cultural upbringing. From this perspective, the featured figure’s mask-like face, disjunctive body, and gender ambiguity further implicate, interrogate, and perhaps undermine international fascination with the “primitive.” I argue that in Yellow Nude Sonia Delaunay both recreated the popular type of the exotic foreign woman and subtly undercut the ideologies behind the genre through specific references likely legible to those who shared her background.