Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism. These are among the many -isms of early 20th-century European modernism, an artistic lineage that’s chock full of movements appended with that suffix. But Orphism? That’s not likely one discussed much today outside academia, and perhaps for a good reason: it barely existed.
This, at least, is something one could draw from the Guggenheim Museum’s sprawling Orphism survey, a wonderfully nerdy exhibition about one of the more unfashionable modernist styles. It’s tempting to say the show, titled “Harmony and Dissonance,” makes the case for why Orphism matters, but it doesn’t—not that that’s a count against its curatorial thesis. Instead, this Guggenheim blockbuster, which surveys work made between 1910 and the early ’40s, proves that Orphism was less a movement than a pivotal transitional moment in Western art history.
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What, exactly, was Orphism, then? Well, the answer to that is sort of complicated. For the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, its inventor, Orphism was an artistic tendency that sought to offer “a more internal, less intellectual, more poetic vision of the universe and of life,” as he wrote in 1913. That’s a pretty squishy definition, but Apollinaire knew Orphism when he saw it. And he saw it specifically in the work of Paris-based artists such as Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia, both of whom were, at the time, painting highly stylized images composed of fractured forms that appeared to dance around their canvases. Apollinaire claimed that these works translated sounds into images and in that way embodied the spirit of Orpheus, the Greek mythological hero known as a preternaturally talented musician.
Both Delaunay and Picabia appear early in the Guggenheim show, grouped together in a gallery that suggests the many forms Orphism took. Delaunay is represented by a circular painting in which the moon shatters into an amalgam of variously colored disks; Picabia by the wonderfully weird Edtaonisl (Ecclésiastique), from 1913, which looks like an explosion of machine innards. The harsh, industrial look of Picabia’s painting shares very little in common with the opulence of Delaunay’s highly saturated colors, yet Apollinaire brought the two together and called it a movement.
Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) (Edtaonisl [Ecclésiastique]), 1913.
©2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Photo Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York/Art Institute of Chicago
He also lumped in František Kupka, whose Localization of Graphic Motifs II (1912–13) is here at the Guggenheim alongside Edtaonisl. The Kupka painting likewise borders on total abstraction, with an angel-like figure at its center whose wings emit pulsing black, purple, and green forms. Those forms ripple across the canvas, as though they were visualizing an echo.
But Kupka was himself surprised to learn he was an Orphist—he once said that the movement “jumped from the head of a man who’s poorly informed.” (Ouch!) And that’s not to mention all the Orphists who, by the end of the 1910s, had split off and gone in a different direction. Picabia, who had an avowedly Orphist phase, and Marcel Duchamp, who did not, ended up hitching their wagons to Dada, a movement predicated upon absurdism, not abstraction. Fernand Léger, who has historically been considered Cubism-adjacent, finished out the decade with a mode that he called tubism, in which humans and their surroundings were formed from metallic-looking cylinders.
Morgan Russell, Four Part Synchromy, Number 7, 1914–15.
©Whitney Museum/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York
Then there were others who explicitly defined themselves in relation to Orphism. Ticked off that Apollinaire had dismissed one of his paintings as being “vaguely orphic,” Morgan Russell, an American who exhibited in Paris, developed his own offshoot: Synchromism, which he believed was more invested in the use of color to achieve a certain spark he felt was missing from Orphism. In Cosmic Synchromy (1913–14), one of the effervescent works by Russell in this show, circles composed of orange, yellow, and green bands whirl through space, colliding into each other as they twist onward. To confuse a work like this for an Orphist painting, Russell said, was “to take a tiger for a zebra.”
Mixing up a tiger and a zebra would be totally understandable, however, since Russell and the Orphists were both responding to the same thing: new ways of seeing during the modern era, when everything was changing faster than ever.
Novel forms of color theory, particularly those of M.E. Chevreul during the mid-19th century, showed how the eye perceives unlike hues differently when set beside one another. (Notice the multitude of circles here in the Guggenheim show, and then recall that Chevreul had a habit of drawing color wheels.) Picking up where Post-Impressionists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac left off, the Orphists sought to gently burn images into the retinas of modern viewers, whom they hoped might never see the same way again.
Robert Delaunay, Red Eiffel Tower (La tour rouge), 1911–12.
Photo Midge Wattles, Guggenheim Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift
Frequently, these artists accomplished their aesthetic goals by relying heavily upon the trappings of Cubism, a much more cohesive movement that sought multi-perspectival forms of representation. Take Léger’s The Smokers (Les Fumeurs), from 1911–12, a painting in which a man, shown from two perspectives, can be seen puffing on a cigarette while looking out over the rooftops of Paris. The man’s foreheads are refracted into cuboidal forms within a landscape of boxy trees, triangular rooftops, and elliptical puffs of white smoke, all of which are represented as though they were piled on top of another.
Das ist nicht so unähnlich zu der Art und Weise, wie die Gründer des Kubismus, Picasso und Braque, Gitarren in dreidimensionale Formen zerschnitten und zerhackten, um sie dann im abstrakten Raum wieder zusammenzuwürfeln.
Es ist umstritten, ob „The Smokers“ wirklich Apollinaires Dekret erfüllt, dass die Orphistische Kunst eine „eine internere, weniger intellektuelle, poetischere Vision des Universums und des Lebens“ präsentieren sollte. Möglicherweise gab es wenige modernistische Bewegungen, die weniger intern, intellektueller und weniger poetisch waren als der Kubismus. Es gibt einen Grund, warum der Analytische Kubismus seinen Namen erhalten hat. „The Smokers“ zeigt einen Mangel an Poesie, der es als kubistisch und nicht als orphistisch qualifizieren sollte. Vielleicht liegt das daran, dass es sich mit den harten Fakten des modernen Lebens in Frankreich befasst – das heißt, erkennbar figurative Bildmotive. Die Internität, die Apollinaire suchte, würde anscheinend etwas ganz anderes erfordern.