Curated by Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene
“THE REIGN OF ORPHEUS IS BEGINNING,” declared the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire in his review of the 1913 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Less a movement than a loose constellation of Parisian painters in the same orbit, Orphism, according to Apollinaire, variously denoted the “art of painting new compositions with elements not taken from reality as it is seen, but entirely created by the artist and invested by him with a powerful reality”; a school of painters who had “arrived at a more internal, less intellectual, more poetic vision of the universe and of life”; and an art of “pure aesthetic pleasure.” This elastic definition, largely articulated in response to exhibitions, could accommodate a range of painters with distinct approaches. Most closely associated with Robert Delaunay’s luminous disks, the Orphist label was also attached to Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia, artists who seemed to have little in common stylistically but who shared an interest in pushing their work into the realm of pure abstraction.
In fact, by the time of Apollinaire’s pronouncement, the end was already near. Orphism’s supposed adherents mostly denied belonging in the first place, but the onset of World War I the following year put an end to whatever incipient collective spirit the critic discerned in the salons and studios of Paris. For some artists, like Duchamp and Picabia, Orphism was merely a way station they passed through en route to the mature work for which they are best known; others, like Delaunay and Kupka, kept painting in a similar idiom throughout their careers, without ever fully recapturing their prewar momentum.
Hence the art-historical problem posed by Orphism: It is impossible to disregard the profound accomplishment of a painting like Kupka’s Amorpha, fugue à deux couleurs (Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors), 1912, or Delaunay’s Premier disque (First Disk), 1913, which rank among the first abstract works exhibited in Europe (First Disk being the most radically nonobjective of its moment), yet it is difficult to pinpoint where that accomplishment led, eclipsed as it was by the antics of Surrealism and Dada, on the one hand, and the architectonic abstraction of De Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus on the other. As Gordon Hughes points out in his 2014 study of Delaunay, Orphism is the only dead end in Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s infamous genealogy of modernism, the ism that “goes exactly nowhere.”
“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York never quite finds its way out of this quandary. The show opens with the promising suggestion of coherence, presenting a tight grouping of greatest hits. Delaunay’s Soleil, lune, simultané 2 (Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon), 1913, a radiant tondo evoking celestial bodies in orbit, is placed high on one wall, hovering to the side of his wife Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914, whose banded disks of color were influenced by the electric lamps newly installed on the streets of Paris. Facing the Delaunays are Kupka’s Localisation de mobiles graphiques II (Localization of Graphic Motifs II), 1912–13, a whirling vortex of bladelike forms in a wild palette of fuchsia and emerald, and Picabia’s Edtaonisl (Ecclésiastique) (Edtaonisl [Ecclesiastic]), 1913, a jigsaw arrangement of twisting coils and irregular planes with a suggestively mechanical sheen, supposedly inspired by an encounter with the notorious dancer Stacia Napierkowska. (The seemingly nonsense title is a mash-up of the words étoile and danse.)
The paintings are stylistically dissimilar, but the relationship is familial. You can sense, in this room, why Apollinaire instinctively believed these artists belonged together, even if they themselves were not so sure. To begin with the obvious, each one rejected the dour monochrome palettes of Cubism in favor of brilliant color contrasts and traded angular grids for interpenetrating arcs and disks. But the more profound difference from the Cubists in their milieu was a willingness to let go of representation altogether. Though objects and entities in the world might serve as a point of reference, none of these artists—at least at this moment—were interested in depicting it outright, let alone legibly. Instead, they aspired to capture the sensation of light and motion itself, evoked in each of these four paintings through pulsing rhythms radiating from a central node. But as the show proceeds up the Guggenheim’s rotunda, this initial impression of cohesion falls away, pushing the already hazy picture of Orphism in multiple, perhaps irreconcilable directions.
Orphism was cast by Apollinaire as a Cubist offshoot (he refers to it initially as “Orphic Cubism” in his 1913 essay collection Les Peintres Cubistes [The Cubist Painters]), but in many respects it was more akin to a Post-Post-Impressionism. Though inflected by Cubism’s decisive break with the model of perspectival illusionism that had reigned since the Renaissance, Orphism ultimately prioritized a more extreme version of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist interest in the optical effects of light and the science of color, in particular the color theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Charles Henry, and Ogden Rood. (The Delaunays were explicit about their debt to Chevreul’s 1839 treatise De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs [Laws of Simultaneous Color Contrasts], which described how the perception of a given color is affected by adjacent hues.) In place of the semiotic play underpinning the Cubism of Picasso and Braque—an exploration of the limit case of representation—or the Salon Cubists’ systematic use of faceting to deconstruct objects in space, the painters affiliated with Orphism focused on optical and perceptual sensation.
Hence the art-historical problem posed by Orphism: It is impossible to disregard its profound accomplishment, yet it is difficult to pinpoint where that accomplishment led.
In particular, they captured the sensorium of modernity: the dizzying speed of the new Paris Métro, the pulse of electric light at night, the flickering movement of a film strip, all of which seemed to dissolve and penetrate form. Alongside these tangible landmarks of the technological revolution underway were any number of recent scientific discoveries pointing to a teeming world of matter lurking beneath the visible: subatomic particles, radio waves, X-rays. In Delaunay’s earlier Cubist depictions of the Eiffel Tower, 1911–12, two of which are included here, the structure appears as the jagged and fragmented centerpiece of a cityscape, pitched forward and pulled back at once to capture a sense of its vertiginous height. By contrast, in the majestic L’équipe de Cardiff (The Cardiff Team), 1913, based on a newspaper photograph of a rugby match, silhouettes of the tower, the Great Wheel, the athletes’ bodies leaping through the air after the ball, and the spectators cheering them on are all arrayed on the same plane, dissolving any sense of foreground and background to form a kind of interlocking pattern across the surface. Sonia Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier, from the same year, translates the atmosphere of the Paris dance hall the couple frequented into a prismatic panorama, with dancers performing the tango loosely rendered as serpentine silhouettes, while Picabia’s Culture physique (Physical Culture), 1913, is an even more fully abstract evocation of athletes in motion, the figures altogether absent except as flesh-tone ribbons winding across the canvas.
The so-called Orphists were hardly alone in these interests. There is considerable overlap, aesthetically and interpersonally, with not only Cubism but also Futurism and Expressionism, among other, more marginal isms (e.g., Synchromism, Rayonism). Apollinaire’s own idiosyncratic categorization doesn’t help the curators, Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, in their attempts to define the contours of a movement that no artist really claimed as their own. Kupka, whose work at the 1912 Salon d’Automne was anecdotally reported to be the initial inspiration for the term Orphism, is written out of Apollinaire’s account entirely after he publicly rebuffs the critic’s praise for his work as misguided, while Duchamp’s somber Nu [esquisse], jeune homme triste dans un train (Nude [Study], Sad Young Man in a Train), 1911–12, is explicitly mentioned, despite its total lack of the radiant color whose presence would become Orphism’s defining characteristic.
The show’s most important historical contribution is returning Sonia Delaunay to the center of the story. Unmentioned by Apollinaire and long treated as a historical footnote in Robert’s career, she emerges here as the more inventive artist, adopting a transmedial, multidimensional approach to the style she and her husband called simultanéisme in an attempt to make it a truly living art. Accompanying her painting of the Bal Bullier are sketches for one of the “simultaneous dresses” she intended to be worn there, its surface activated through the ecstatic movements of a patron’s dancing body, and the jubilant toy box she designed for her young son. Best of all is the exquisite “simultaneous book” she coproduced with poet Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), 1913, interlacing Cendrars’s fragmentary narrative of a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad with Delaunay’s vibrant arcs of color. Printed vertically and bound accordion style, the book displays text and image cascading down the page like a train hurtling through the countryside, culminating in the Eiffel Tower’s diminutive silhouette floating atop the paper’s lower edge.
Other inclusions are more questionable. In the show’s second half, in particular, the focus shifts from giving shape to Orphism, as a set of overlapping formal and theoretical concerns among a specific cohort of Parisian artists in the years leading up to World War I, to charting the diffusion of those aesthetics across Europe and the United States. The idea that the Paris-based American painters Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell’s Synchromism was in a semi-rivalrous conversation with Orphism seems convincing enough, despite their loud protestations to the contrary. Less clear is the relevance of a work like David Bomberg’s In the Hold, ca. 1913–14, a hard-edge geometric abstraction organized around an orthogonal grid, inspired by the dock workers in London’s East End, or Alexander Archipenko’s static sculptures of a stylized Pierrot. And what exactly do the curators mean when they say, in a wall label, that Giacomo Balla’s Mercurio transita davanti al sole (Mercury Passing Before the Sun), 1914—a depiction of a specific astronomical event (the transit of Mercury on November 17, 1914) as seen through the artist’s telescope—is “aligned more with Orphism” than with Italian Futurism, the movement to which he avowedly belonged, “if perhaps unwittingly”?
For the Delaunays and Kupka in particular, the invocation of simultaneity was not just a matter of rendering the impression of speed and movement through dynamic compositional and formal elements (for instance, Futurist force lines trailing behind a rearing horse or sprinting cyclist), but also the perceptual sensations that the paintings literally produced in the viewer. Somewhere along the line in the exhibition, this more specific concern with exploring how optical effects could be marshaled toward compositional ends is dropped in favor of a more generic understanding of modernist simultaneity as representing the multiplicity of time and space. Here, Orphism comes to mean virtually any instance of an artist exploring colorful abstraction in the teens and beyond, sidestepping the thorny but valuable work of defining what, if anything, set Orphism apart from other, apparently similar tendencies—and if the curators’ answer is Nothing, really, then why call the show “Orphism in Paris” at all?
Perhaps ironically, a more or less convincing picture of what Orphism was does ultimately emerge in the exhibition, through comparison with what it is almost certainly not. Marc Chagall’s Hommage à Apollinaire (Homage to Apollinaire), 1913, for example, which sets an angular nude against a spinning colored disk, is self-evidently indebted to Robert Delaunay, but the effect of its broad areas of mottled, opaque color is heavy and emotive where the Delaunays’ works are vibratory and atmospheric. Despite the description of Jean Metzinger’s Danseuse au café (Dancer in a Café), 1912, as “demonstrating an interest in the simultaneity typical of Orphism and Italian Futurism,” its schematic dissection of a café-concert has little in common with Sonia Delaunay’s pulsing Bal Bullier; or Kupka’s Disques de Newton (Étude pour “La fugue à 2 couleurs”) (Disks of Newton [Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”]), 1912, whose title nods to both the structure of music and the science of color, the painting part of a series of works that progressively distill the movement of his stepdaughter’s ball arcing through the air in the family’s garden into pure abstraction. A baffling “coda” featuring postwar works by Albert Gleizes—late canvases that mash together various Cubist and post-Cubist idioms—and his justifiably obscure Irish student Mainie Jellett illustrates not so much Orphism’s vital afterlife as its obsolescence. Not every movement has a hidden transnational, intergenerational history to uncover, or uncannily anticipates the concerns of the present: In their attempts to expand the Orphist orbit, the show’s curators reveal how narrow it actually was.
“Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” is on view through March 9.
Rachel Wetzler is a senior editor of Artforum.
