Death is what artists fixate on—it’s the threshold of posterity. The painter who hits his or her stride only around thirty, as have many modern artists, needs a longish life to accomplish the work. But if an artist dies at an advanced age, some of the clarifying process that death applies to the shape of the career may already have begun. It’s possible to outlive one’s mature style and pass into a “late” style; or to outlive the generation with whom one made one’s mark; or to outlive the revolutionary impact of one’s work; or simply to outlive one’s fame or popularity. The biographer who wants to make sense of a long artistic life may have to trace more than one decline, as well as the rise of more than one reputation.

Her artistic career can’t be seen as a simple trajectory through painting from youth to old age.

Sonia Delaunay’s long life, the subject of Axel Madsen’s new biography, was a curiously doubled one.¹ Her artistic career can’t be seen as a simple trajectory through painting from youth to old age (she died in 1979 at age ninety-four). Almost from its beginning, Delaunay’s artistic activity was divided (often very unevenly) between design—books, fabrics, clothing, home furnishings, stained glass, even cars were among the surfaces to which she applied her art—and plain old painting, whether in gouache on paper or oil on canvas. The design career brought her money and fame in her thirties; it first