Lecture Abstract

In 1924, the painter Sonia Delaunay opened a commercial fashion house, Atelier Simultané. This talk examines how Delaunay marketed her Simultaneous designs as a nascent form of lifestyle consumerism. Embracing many of the contemporary standards for advertising, Delaunay used these techniques of publicity to gain recognition as a woman artist working within a masculinist avant-garde and fashion industry alike. Shaping a public image of herself and her brand for others to consume, Delaunay offers an alternative model of the avant-garde’s ambition to unify art and life, though it is one entirely enmeshed within the conditions of modern capitalism. 

The Association of Graduate Art Students (AGAS) lecture is sponsored by the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Image: Photograph of two models wearing clothing by Sonia Delaunay, with a Citroën B12 painted after one of the artist’s textile designs, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, Paris, France, 1925 (photo by Rep Boulogne-Billancourt Photographie).

Lecturer Bio

Rachel Silveri is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida. She specializes in the history of modern art in Europe and North America, with a particular emphasis in early twentieth-century French modernism. Her research interests include theories and historiographies of the avant-gardes; theories of the everyday; feminist thought and queer theory; and artistic responses to the rise of reactionary politics.  

Silveri’s current book project, The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris, reexamines the avant-garde ambition to unify art and everyday life through a set of experimental life practices established by artists across Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances of identity, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to work the Surrealist Research Bureau, her research proposes a broader envisioning of avant-garde material culture to examine the ways in which artists creatively produced an “art of living” relative to the normative types of “lifestyle” produced contemporaneously in France during the years 1910–1930. By elaborating these practices, her book expands current definitions of avant-garde politics to include an ethics of self-making.

She is in the preliminary stages of a second project, tentatively titled "It Was Yesterday, Dada": Women's Histories of the Avant-Garde, which considers how various women artists, models, and muses contributed to the avant-garde and challenged its dominant narratives through forms of memoir-writing and autobiography. 

Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A. History of Art and Women’s Studies, with Highest Honors in History of Art, 2008) and Columbia University (Ph.D. Art History and Archaeology, 2017), Silveri is the recipient of grants from The Getty Foundation, The Alliance Program, The Starr Foundation, The Stillman-Lack Foundation, The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and CAA Advancing Art & Design. From 2014–2015, she was a Mellon-funded Museum Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art where she worked on a retrospective of the artist Francis Picabia. She joined the Art History program at the University of Florida in 2018. She is affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; the Center for European Studies; and the Center for Arts, Migration + Entrepreneurship; and she is a 2023 Global Fellow at the University of Florida International Center. Working with a team of graduate students, she is the curator of the exhibition Surrealism at the Harn: A Centennial Celebration, scheduled to open at the Harn Museum of Art (December 9, 2023–June 2, 2024). 

In 2022–2023, she was named the College of the Arts Undergraduate Teacher of the Year.