Open now at the Guggenheim in New York, “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” sees over 90 artworks from this fascinating historical moment, displayed in the museum’s iconic rotunda. The exhibition explores the international movement as it took shape in the French capital, looking at the impacts of art forms such as dance, music, and poetry on artists working in this mode.
Orphism was a short-lived, Cubist-inspired movement founded in Paris in the 1910s, as the advances of modern life were overturning traditional conceptions of time and space and artists, per the museum’s description, “engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, investigating the transformative possibilities of color, form, and motion.” The poet Guillaume Apollinaire gave the movement its name in 1912, referring to the Greek musician and poet Orpheus, whom he saw as the representation of pure artistry.
Installation view,
Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Photo: David Heald ©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
In 1936, the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred J. Barr Jr., included Orphism in his famous flow chart, which traced the flow of influence between Modern art movements from 1890 to 1935. Orphism was the only one not indicated in Barr’s chart to have influenced any other artistic movements: it’s a dead end. The Guggenheim bills its exhibition as the first in-depth examination of Orphism, and, by contrast with Barr’s estimation, it makes an effort to demonstrate the enduring impact of this often-overlooked movement.
“We wished to frame the emergence of abstraction in Paris at a transformative and optimistic moment in time when myriad innovations altered conceptions of time and space, placing the notion of ‘simultaneity’ at center stage,” exhibition curator Vivien Greene told me in an email. “While art history generally considers many of these artists individually or in small subsets, and they often resisted labels, this endeavor allowed us to connect a transnational constellation of figures (many of whom were not French), and explore commonalities and differences between them.
“Ultimately,” Greene added, “we were most fascinated by all they shared: an investment in color theory, the commitment to expressing the experience of modernity and simultaneity, an interest in how other disciplines could play a tangible role in visual art—notably music, dance, and poetry—and the aspiration that painting could transcend the canvas and elicit multisensory effects.”
But who was at the center of Orphism? Here are five of the movement’s key players, all of them included in the exhibition.
Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms (1930). Photo: Kristopher McKay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Robert Delaunay
One half of one of art history’s famous couples, Robert Delaunay met the artist born Sonia Terk in 1909 while he was a young artist establishing himself in the French capital. Sonia amicably left her marriage of convenience to the art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, and the pair married in 1910. In the decade he and Sonia would create their Orphist masterpieces, and he was also a member of the Munich-based Blaue Reiter movement, led by Wassily Kandinsky.
Sonia Delaunay
Born in 1885 in modern-day Ukraine, Sonia Terk was adopted as a child by a wealthy uncle who afforded her a lifestyle marked by travel and access to culture, setting her up for her artistic training in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Sonia was more likely to refer to herself as a Simultanist than an Orphist. (In 1925, the Delaunays even trademarked the term Simultanism, which they preferred when describing their work. Simultanism referenced the visual impact of the color combinations they placed boldly together.) Her designs were not limited to canvas: her work was seen on catwalks and cars, film sets, and furniture. In 1917 she created the costumes for art critic and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s production of the ballet Cleopatra (with Robert creating the stage designs), and she opened several fashion studios in her lifetime.
František Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”) (1912). © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
František Kupka
Born in the Czech Republic in 1871, František Kupka studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts before becoming an illustrator in Paris. Deeply spiritual and fascinated by philosophy and theosophy, he meshed his interest in color theory and musical harmony with art. He began creating color wheels in the 1910s, inspired by Sir Isaac Newton’s 17th-century discovery that sunlight is made up of seven colors. This resulted in Kupka’s series of Orphist masterpieces, the Disks of Newton, some examples of which appear in the Guggenheim exhibition. Kupka’s Divertimento I (1935) was also restored especially for the show.
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso
The Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was born in 1887 and died just 30 years later of Spanish flu. In his short life, he managed to build a reputation as a pioneer in Portuguese Modernism, and surrounded himself with Europe’s cutting-edge artists, becoming close friends with the Delaunays, whom he met while the couple lived in Portugal briefly during World War I. Like Robert Delaunay, De Souza-Cardoso exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show, displaying paintings that were heavily inspired by Cubism and Italian Futurism. Defying strict categorization, De Souza-Cardoso’s works in the Guggenheim show make clear the boundaries of Orphism and its place in an ever-evolving Modern art style.
Mainie Jellett, Painting (1938). Photo: National Museums NI.
Mainie Jellett
Creating her most significant works in the 1930s, Mainie Jellett is celebrated in “Harmony and Dissonance” as an artist who kept the Orphist style alive 20 years after the movement’s conception. Born in 1897 in Dublin, Jellett studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in the Irish capital. It wasn’t until she worked with Post-Impressionist Walter Sickert at the end of the 1910s that Jellett committed to a career as a painter, having continued piano lessons up until then with the hope of becoming a concert pianist. Jellett’s works are among several in the exhibition that were created in the 1930s and beyond, demonstrating the lasting influence of Orphism on young artists, long after the death of Apollinaire.