From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
It was the critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire who launched the boat that was Orphism. Trying, in his book The Cubist Painters (1913), to distinguish between the pre-war Paris avant-gardes, he argued that there was a group of artists who stood apart from the ‘scientific cubists’, as he described Picasso and Braque. Their work was more abstract and lyrical and, invoking the Greek poet Orpheus, he named them the ‘Orphic cubists’. It wasn’t enough to just describe that amorphous terrain around cubists; Apollinaire felt that there had to be another ‘ism’. Since neo-Impressionism in the 1880s, each new wave of artists had had one. It was branding that conferred mystique, though even Apollinaire – who coined the term ‘Surrealism’, and was the greatest art brand strategist of his time – realised that it had become a shtick. He once claimed there was a new movement called ‘excentroconcentroconcepticorationaloorphism’.
Orphism isn’t well remembered – those who supposedly filled its ranks are perhaps better known – but it’s mostly associated with the French painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941). The rainbow prisms of his signature discs greet us at the outset of the Guggenheim’s show ‘Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930’, and they recur throughout in various artists’ work, coming to resemble a kind of semaphore for the Orphic cult. Delaunay inherited the Impressionists’ fascination with colour theory and reanimated it in the moment total abstraction was born. If there was one motif that kept him anchored in the palpable world it was the Eiffel Tower, which appears regularly in his work. But he renders even that hefty construction ethereal, apparently borne aloft by clouds of steam. Delaunay seems at times to have a kind of awed disbelief in the visible world; many of the other Orphists were lured to dense and esoteric ideas. Henri Bergson’s philosophy was one preoccupation, but far stranger notions were drawn from recent advances in geometry and speculation about a fourth dimension. It’s a heady mix and, as the show unfolds in New York, it gathers a hypnotic and dizzying strength, Delaunay’s discs chiming and spinning as you climb the Guggenheim’s spiralling ramp. I could forgive myself for being seduced: it’s said that with his lyre, Orpheus could charm birds and beasts and even the stones on the ground.
Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) (1913), Francis Picabia. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY; © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
But if the ineffable is bewitching in Orphist art, it is a problem in Orphism the putative movement, which rarely feels real. A writhing abstraction by Francis Picabia hangs next to Delaunay’s work in the opening room, and that’s immediately puzzling. It’s true that Apollinaire felt that Picabia (as well as Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp, who are also represented here) was a key exponent of the style, yet the fierce physicality and bodily pulse of his work seem best explained by the Dada movement, of which he would soon become a central part. To label Picabia an Orphist seems a stretch and, as the show proceeds, Orphism the label is asked to do contortions of the kind more usually seen in advanced yoga, bending to include everyone from Umberto Boccioni to David Bomberg, Natalia Goncharova to Morgan Russell, all of whom are more readily associated with other movements, such as futurism and synchromism.
One benefit of the show’s broad reach is to illuminate some figures who don’t deserve to be in the gloom of Picasso’s shadow, where they usually reside. Albert Gleizes, for example, is responsible for several of the most characterful and kinetic pictures in the show. His designs for Circus Equestrienne and Spanish Dancer (both 1916) have the graphic panache of playing cards. Nevertheless, by the end of the exhibition, you may feel less certain of what Orphism was than when you began. Some delicious loans aside, the show makes the style feel thin, little more than a period look – an antecedent of the geometric curves and zigzags of art deco. But maybe that reflects reality: it doesn’t seem coincidental that Sonia Delaunay (who has deservedly won more attention than her husband, Robert, in recent decades) is renowned for carrying the style out of painting and into interior design, fashion and stage design – maybe this was what chic looked like in 1912.
On Brooklyn Bridge (1917), Albert Gleizes. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; © Estate of Albert Gleizes/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
The show includes her acclaimed collaboration with the poet Blaise Cendrars, a long, accordion-folded page entitled The Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France (1913), but it’s a shame that it doesn’t include her ‘simultaneous’ dress, a geometric patchwork design that proposed vestments for the worship of modernity. Maybe Orphism records what the whole of modern, urban life seemed like: it was a gas-light hallucination that exceeded painting’s ability to depict. But Orphism the movement still feels like an effect of the light, or like a firework that explodes into a moment of order and pattern before dispersing.
It doesn’t help that the movement never had enough coherence or theoretical heft to create moments of argument or crisis that might have revealed its heart. ‘Orphism’ was a critic’s term; if it was a movement, it lacked any conscious beginning – no manifesto and no succès de scandale in the galleries. Apollinaire himself lost interest in the style shortly after giving it a name. Yet the more you’re seduced by the airy abstraction, infected with the zest for liberation that surges through these pictures (a painting can be anything!), the more you mournfully realise that it did have an end: nothing this joyous could survive the First World War. The show may stretch through the 1920s, but the style’s spirit was born in an optimism that had never known the trenches. In the exhibition’s last picture, painted in 1930, Delaunay is still painting his shining discs, as if the sun of pre-war liberation was still blazing, but by that point they feel like relics.
Circular Forms (1930), Robert Delaunay. Photo: Kristopher McKay/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
‘Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930’ is at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, until 9 March.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.