A Wonderful Orphism Show at the Guggenheim Surveys the Modernist Movement That Wasn’t

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. That’s not so dissimilar from how Cubism’s founders, Picasso and Braque, sliced and diced guitars into three-dimensional forms, then jumbled them back together in abstracted space.

It’s debatable that The Smokers really does fulfill Apollinaire’s edict that Orphist art ought to present “a more internal, less intellectual, more poetic vision of the universe and of life.” Arguably, there were few modernist movements less internal, more intellectual, and less poetic than Cubism. There is a reason, after all, that Analytical Cubism earned its name. The Smokers exhibits a lack of poetry that should qualify it as Cubist, not Orphist. Perhaps that’s because it deals with the cold, hard facts of modern life in France—which is to say, recognizably figurative imagery. The internality Apollinaire sought would seem to demand something else altogether.

When the Orphists took the plunge into full-on abstraction, they were more successful at achieving Apollinaire’s mandate. Robert Delaunay’s First Disk (1913–14), one of the earliest totally non-objective works in this exhibition, is a circular canvas divided into quadrants. Arcing rows, each in mismatched colors, ripple outward from the center, creating a target-like form that contains its own bizarre harmony. The painting, which measures nearly 4.5 feet in diameter, gets nearly a full bay at the Guggenheim all to itself. It is every bit as shocking today as it must have been over a century ago.

First Disk is one of the few works here that checks off all of Apollinaire’s Orphist boxes, and that’s all the more intriguing because many of the others in the small cohort that meet all the requirements are not by Orphists. Consider the case of Gino Severini’s Dancer = Propeller = Sea (Danseuse—Hélice—Mer), from 1915, a diamond-shaped canvas in which sinuous Technicolored-forms writhe around as thorn-like yellow triangles poke through them. Severini was an Italian Futurist, but the work contains the very same “vaguely orphic” quality Apollinaire once detected in Morgan Russell’s art.

No wonder Alfred H. Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, awkwardly sandwiched Orphism between Cubism and Futurism on his famed map of modernism. Orphism was an in-between space—the missing link between Cubism, Futurism, and all that came after it. Not distinct enough to have its own offshoots yet not disinteresting enough either to toss out altogether, Orphism is one of those micro-styles that helped Western art get to where it was going. Don’t expect Orphism to become a mainstay of Art History 101 curricula after this exhibition ends in March, but do expect to begin to discover remnants of its influence where you least expect.

Orphism fell out of favor not long after it began, its emphasis on lushness outmoded by the horrors of World War I. But the Guggenheim show smartly continues on after the end of Orphism—and after Apollinaire’s death in 1918—to suggest that this non-movement still left a lasting imprint on modern art.

In one of the final galleries, there’s Mainie Jellett’s Painting (1938), in which bands of mint green and maroon slide through an expanse of navy blue. Painted in Ireland 20 years after Apollinaire’s death, Jellett rendered her bands using incongruous colors that seem to recall the very ones utilized by Delaunay in First Disk. Delaunay’s disk, it would seem, never totally stopped spinning.