In a 1913 preview of the Autumn Salon in Paris, where Orphism was being touted as the hot thing in painting, the New York Times wrote: “Ordinary persons may take a long time to accept Orpheism [sic] as an art, but it seems likely that of all the new art cults this will probably win the palm of beauty, instead of being decried as the creation of a disordered imagination.”
While adopting the bemused take of a U.S. newspaper looking on at exotic European cultural squabbles, the piece is unexpectedly sympathetic. The author even seems somewhat charmed after a visit to the studio of František Kupka, the eccentric Czech printmaker, painter, mystic, and nudist who was being presented as the leader of the movement.
František Kupka, Disks of Newton, 1912. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
All the stranger then that, 111 years later, the review reads as too smart for the room. To all appearances, Orphism remains obscure. The other “art cults” in its proximity—Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, to name a few—are the big ones we remember.
Such is the record that “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” arrives to correct at the Guggenheim, hoping to restore the movement to pride of place. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, the exhibition features some 90 handsome paintings and 2 sculptures, displayed along the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral. It has some satisfying highs, though it struggles to find a snappy narrative about Orphism’s significance.
Besides Kupka, who considered himself sui generis and didn’t like being lumped with other artists under the name, the other major Orphists were husband-and-wife duo Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Their upbeat paintings, full of prismatic sunbursts, are what I think of as “Orphic painting.” But the Delaunays called themselves “Simultanists,” and would criticize the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who minted the Orphism label, for not getting them.
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
Other artists Apollinaire defined as key to the movement included Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Both are more famous today for later, more experimental work that makes their Orphism a minor footnote. To today’s eyes, both have paintings in “Harmony and Dissonance” that are hard to read as “Orphic,” if the pleasant patterns of the Delaunays or electric vortexes of Kupka are the standard.
By contrast, as you ascend the Guggenheim ramp, you encounter other paintings that share a general near-abstract tendency, all-over swirls of colors, and the odd Delaunay-esque starburst—but are often as not by artists who truly thought they were doing their own, opposed thing. In this category, you have the American “Synchromatists” Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, whose manifesto said that to confuse them with Orphists was “to take a tiger for a zebra because they both have striped skin,” or Natalia Goncharova, who called herself a “Rayonist.” The show, I think, should really be called “Orphism and Friends.”
Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Conception Life-Cycle Series No. II, 1914. Image courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Or, actually, “Orphism and Friends and Enemies.” There are also an Italian Futurist canvasses here by Gino Severini and Giacomo Balla, even though the Futurists bitterly argued that the Orphists bit their style and that any primacy given to its originality was French chauvinism. “Orphism… is nothing but an elegant disguise of the fundamental principles of Futurist painting,” Umberto Boccioni sneered in 1913.
The upshot is this: The show gives you things that look like “Orphism” but aren’t it, and things that are technically “Orphist” and don’t look like it. It’s hard to see that the name comfortably fits anything. So, what to do with this incongruous art energy?
To be fair, there’s a degree of confusion baked into the term from its origin. In his collection of criticism called The Cubist Painters where he theorized and propagandized the movement, Apollinaire’s enthusiasm has the magnetism of a poet writing about art, at its best—but his concepts have the woolliness of a poet writing about art, at its worst.
He’s clear at least that he views Orphism as a spur of Cubism, the Parisian painting style that had scandalized and titillated art-watchers everywhere around 1908. In fact, “Orphic Cubism” was one of his two major tendencies of Cubism, the counterpoint to “Scientific Cubism,” the more familiar Picasso-and-Braque kind. Orphism was, Apollinaire wrote, “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.”
Robert Delaunay, Red Eiffel Tower, 1911–12. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
In other words: It’s not that clear of a creed.
Coming out of the Guggenheim show, I think there are two useful ways to think about Orphism’s fate and status: one negative that localizes it and one positive that generalizes it. The conventional take on this period—what John Berger called the “moment of Cubism”—is that the spirit of its art is extremely tied to the optimistic pre-war era of technological progress and rising living standards in the imperial centers. Life seemed to be getting better, human ingenuity seemed to be having positive effects, and all pursuits were being dragged happily along in the tow of innovation and experimentation.
Robert Delaunay’s well-known canvasses from around 1911 are very good symbols of this spirit of positive modernity, featuring the recurring motif of the Eiffel Tower and the biplane—wonders of engineering and technology. So is Sonia Delauney’s frieze-like abstraction of a tango cabaret, gyrating figures encoded to illegibility in a welter of colored facets, capturing the excitement of urban nightlife. And so too are the Delaunays’ verging-on-abstract canvasses with their radial bursts of coruscating colors, inspired by the miracle of electric lightbulbs and observation of the heavens. These evoke the accessible science of color wheels and prisms.
Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (ecclesiastique), 1913. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The reason why Orphism’s star dimmed, and that 1913 prophecy of its permanent ascent from the Times didn’t arrive, is obvious: The unspeakable continent-wide strife to come one year later, as war broke out across Europe. Among other things, that conflict literally broke Orphism’s original advocate Apollinaire, who in early 1916 was injured by shrapnel and never recovered.
It also scattered its artists and severed for a generation the optimistic idea of ever-upward progress, and thus of the potential harmonic synthesis of art and science that the best of Orphism represented, with its fusion of lyricism and rationalism, dynamism and tranquility. It makes great sense that the deflationary, anti-art Dada movement would attract the talents of artists like Duchamp and Picabia. Though “Harmony and Dissonance” technically ends in 1930, its vital innovations are bunched in the early teens—thereafter, the show just seems to drift along in a sunny pocket world.
Here, it’s worth noting that another show from earlier this year, “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, told a more dynamic story. The Guggenheim exhibition does showcase the collaborative poetry book she did with poet Blaise Cendrars, an important experiment for her. But the Bard show really presented her as a polymath. Her interests in expressive color and practical science set her up to be influential when mass optimism returned in the form of consumer culture (she lived quite a bit longer than Robert). Her vision diffused widely through fashion, costume, furniture, book, and textile design in ways that feel very connected to the present, and that don’t trail off like they seem to do in the Guggenheim’s account of Orphism’s afterlife.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) french abstract painter of russian origins, wife of RobertDelaunay (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)
Which brings me to the second angle on Orphism: Another way of looking at why it reads as a bit of blur now is that it has become so general we can’t see what made it vibrant and distinct.
To this day, Cubist painting—the stuff that came before Orphism and inspired it—remains arresting in its idiosyncrasy, even as it evokes a very specific lost epoch. It just seems such a weird way of looking at the world: fragmenting it up and viewing one object from multiple sides simultaneously on canvas. Oddly, when Apollinaire wrote about this classic Cubism, he dismissed its “geometric appearance” as beside the point; he saw Cubist art not as a way of depicting an object from multiple angles, but as illustrating a reality that was intellectual, that shared a truth deeper than mere appearance.
Cubism is “not an imitative art, but a conceptual art,” the poet argued. That’s how he could then classify Orphism as a sub-genre of Cubism, even though the artists he thought of as Orphic Cubists were clearly moving beyond “cubifying” reality. For Apollinaire, the kinship was that Orphism, like Cubism, was “conceptual,” asserting mind over matter, imagination over appearance.
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
Perhaps the most concise and intuitive explanation of how to think about Orphism I’ve found is from that old New York Times profile of Kupka: “This prospective cult seeks, in effect, to explain that color has the same effect on the senses as music,” the correspondent reported. “Accordingly, it takes the musical son of Apollo for its name.”
It’s possible that “Orphism” feels vague because it was just one of the aliases that “abstraction” came onto the scene with, at a time when abstract art still needed a cosmic or a scientific subject matter to justify it, before there was a fully worked out way of talking about it. What stood out then was that it was opening the window towards being able to depict the world how you pleased, in color and shape.
Unlike the specific and quirky systems for depicting space and time in Cubism or Futurism, this possibility is something artists now take for granted—it’s so basic that it doesn’t even really feel like a style or something you learn. So it is possible to argue that in the long run Orphism did “win the palm of beauty,” after all.