{"id":1291,"date":"2015-12-09T10:21:51","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T10:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/?p=1291"},"modified":"2015-12-09T10:21:51","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T10:21:51","slug":"yolanda-sonnabend-1935-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/2015\/12\/09\/yolanda-sonnabend-1935-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Yolanda Sonnabend (1935-2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"15Aug10_011_(640x480)\"<\/a>We were saddened to learn recently of the death of the artist and stage designer Yolanda Sonnabend, on 9 November 2015. In May 2013 we were delighted to acquire a collection<\/a> of 200 or so artworks by Sonnabend, produced in collaboration with the developmental biologist C.H. Waddington<\/a>, whose papers were\u00a0catalogued as part of the ‘Towards Dolly’ project.\u00a0This collection was first viewed in 2010 by our colleague Graeme Eddie, who visited Sonnabend in her home and took the photographs featured here.
\n\"15Aug10_024_(640x480)\"Yolanda Pauline Tamara Sonnabend was born on 26 March 1935 in Bulawayo, Southern
\n<\/a> Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to German-Russian parents. After a cultured upbringing, Yolanda\u00a0went on to study art in\u00a0Geneva, and painting and stage design at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She received\u00a0her first design commission at the Royal Ballet in 1958, while she was still an undergraduate, and went on to forge a brilliant career as a stage designer. She worked closely with the choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan throughout the 1960s-1980s, and designed for theatre, opera and ballet shows across Europe, as well as designing Derek Jarman’s 1979 film adaptation of The Tempest.<\/em> She was also an acclaimed portrait painter, whose subjects included\u00a0Stephen Hawking and Steven Berkoff.\u00a0In 2000 Sonnabend was awarded the Garrick\/Milne Prize for theatrical portraiture.\"15Aug10_025_(640x480)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sonnabend’s\u00a0friendship and collaboration\u00a0with C.H. Waddington is captured in the illustrations she produced for his book Tools for Thought: how to understand and apply the latest scientific techniques of problem solving.\u00a0<\/em>Waddington was a biologist and embryologist, and at the time he knew Sonnabend, was the director of the Institute of Animal Genetics<\/a> in Edinburgh. However, Waddington’s interests extended far beyond the purely scientific, encompassing art, architecture, ecology, robotics and early computing; he was also committed to communicating with the wider public about these topics.\u00a0Tools for Thought<\/em> was his final book, published posthumously in 1977, and was intended to be a popular guide to new ways of perceiving and understanding the world’s scientific, political and ecological problems.\u00a0Sonnabend’s stark and\u00a0imaginative pen and ink drawings\u00a0formed the perfect ‘other half’ to the book; incorporating\u00a0triangles, graphs, arrows and bird heads.\"15Aug10_022_(640x480)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of Sonnabend’s designs were, sadly, not included in the final book (Waddington died during the proofing stage), but the originals exist in the collection\u00a0acquired by the Library. \"15Aug10_017_(480x640)\"<\/a>Sketches on graph paper and collages made with shredded magazine articles sit alongside completed, signed pieces. The correspondence which accompanies these works shows the affectionate and intellectual stimulating relationship Sonnabend and Waddington shared.<\/p>\n

Sonnabend’s artistic legacy lives on in the portraits collected by the\u00a0National Portrait Gallery<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the Science Museum<\/a>\u00a0and the Design Collection at the Royal Opera House<\/a> – but her work for C.H. Waddington sheds a new light\u00a0on both their careers.<\/p>\n

With thanks to Graeme Eddie and Dr Joseph Sonnabend.<\/p>\n

Clare Button
\nProject Archivist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were saddened to learn recently of the death of the artist and stage designer Yolanda Sonnabend, on 9 November 2015. In May 2013 we were delighted to acquire a collection of 200 or so artworks by Sonnabend, produced in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p40Aqf-kP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1302,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions\/1302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}