Orphism has always seemed less like an art movement than a spinoff of cubism that flourished and fizzled in short order. Founded in Paris with the supposed goal of infusing the dun-hued planes of cubism with rapturous color, it failed to produce a manifesto or so much as a single scandal. Although the movement was named by Guillaume Apollinaire, the omnipresent poet and critic — he selected the moniker in tribute to Orpheus, the Greek god of music — it had none of the adhesive power of his other art labels, which include cubism and Surrealism.
Who, exactly, were the Orphists? Textbooks dutifully list the artists Robert Delaunay and his wife, Sonia; Francis Picabia and Frantisek Kupka, who was ambivalent at best. Surprised one day to learn from a critic of his putative alliance with Orphism, Kupka wrote a grouchy letter, claiming that the label “had jumped from the head of a man who’s poorly informed.”
“Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930,” a sprawling, mood-lifting, masterpiece-studded exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, confers a thrilling sharpness on a movement that has long been a blur.
Organized by the museum’s veteran curators Vivien Greene and Tracey Bashkoff, the show offers the first in-depth look at Orphism, bringing together about 80 works by 26 artists that mostly date to the enchanted years preceding World War I. It was an upbeat time. Inventions ranging from incandescent lightbulbs to the first cars and airplanes were leading artists to rethink their mission. How do you capture speed and motion in a painting, a medium whose parts do not move?
Granted, you may think that Picasso and Braque had already answered the question adequately. Their Cubist canvases from around 1910, with their radical dismantling of traditional perspective, might seem like the quintessence of modernity. But no, not to the Orphists. Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), who officially broke with cubism in 1912, faulted Picasso for restricting the palette of his still lifes to muted, monkish tones of brown and gray, and for retaining traces of figurative imagery. When Delaunay first saw the cubists’ still lifes, he reportedly exclaimed: “But they’re painting with cobwebs!”
Delaunay, an intellectually inclined Frenchman who was born into a well-to-do family, is the central figure in the Guggenheim show and the artist with the most works on display (13). Did he realize what he was starting when he painted his mesmerizing “First Disk” of 1913, a jumbo tondo (or circular canvas) that measures more than four feet in diameter? It suggests the face of a giant clock, with earthy colors (ocher, lilac, leathery browns) coursing through its concentric rings and changing hues at the quarter-hour mark. The painting is inexplicably soothing, with no beginning and no end, its colors rounding the bend again even when you stop looking.
As you walk up the ramp of the Guggenheim, it is fascinating to realize the degree to which Delaunay’s theories — as encapsulated in the form of the disk or flat circle — spread through the studios of Europe. He reinvented disks as an emblem of reeling modernity. Other artists adopted the form while extracting a range of meanings from it; in the course of the show, disks variously evoke giant eyeballs, the overlapping gears of a Swiss watch or the eternal orbit of planets.
The show could not possibly look better anywhere than it does at the Guggenheim, whose famous rotunda by Frank Lloyd Wright, with its curving walls, uncannily echoes the circular motion in the paintings. All in all, the experience will deepen your affection for circles, unless you happen to share the caution of the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, who once said, “Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.”
It was Delaunay’s odd fate to devise a style that other artists put to better and more memorable use. One of them was his intrepid wife, Sonia Delaunay, who was born Sarah Stern, in Ukraine. She veered between high art and applied art, especially textile design, and is rightfully held up today as a multimedia pioneer, a woman of the zeitgeist who speaks to our own impatience with high-low boundaries.
The Guggenheim gives her a starring role, placing her grandly scaled painting “Electric Prisms,” of 1914, on loan from the Georges Pompidou Center, near the entrance, next to a small tondo by her husband. At first you may think that “Electric Prisms,” which bends and refracts rays of light into so many joyously tumbling circles (and which hasn’t been seen in this country since 1969), was painted by Robert. The show does not clarify their individual styles so much as let them bask in the double-wattage glow of power coupledom.
The exhibition also includes a contingent of American artists who sailed to Europe to study and became momentarily addicted to circling forms. But they’re represented by relatively skimpy works, betraying the Guggenheim’s long bias toward European nonobjective painting. The much-loved Marsden Hartley, for example, is limited to one small abstraction. Thomas Hart Benton weighs in with a small, orb-laden painting titled, goofily, “Bubbles.”
The Europeans, by contrast, steal the show. Kupka, who was born in the former Czechoslovakia and was collected in-depth by an earlier generation of Guggenheim curators, is released at last from museum storage. He is represented by 11 paintings, gouaches and pastels that do not resemble anyone else’s. They offer nervy, high-key color contrasts (hot pink passages nuzzle greens) and proof that abstract painting can be weaponized. “Localization of Graphic Motifs II,” (1912-13), a seven-foot-square painting on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, puts you face to face with what look like the rotating blades of an airplane propeller.
At times, the message of the show spirals out of control, and you will find yourself gazing at a particular composition and asking, “How is this Orphic?” Many of the best works do not follow the Orphism rule book, ignoring bright color in favor of a monochromatic Cubist palette (as in Marcel Duchamp’s tantalizingly enigmatic “The Bride”), or holding on to supposedly taboo figurative imagery.
But let’s not get too tangled up in categories. It is a pleasure, after years of numbing overexposure to Marc Chagall’s later paintings, to reconnect with his fabulously inventive earlier self. Arriving in Paris in 1911 from his native Russia, Chagall melded his love of narrative with the new vogue for circles and arcs. “The Great Wheel,” (1911-12), is probably the best painting you will ever see of a Ferris wheel (a larger category than you might think), with its sky-high circle of yolky yellow lighting up the world.
Apollinaire was among his champions, and Chagall returned the adulation. In his touching “Homage to Apollinaire” (1913) — a large-scale, lesser-known painting from Eindhoven, in the Netherlands — he restages the story of Adam and Eve in modern-day Paris. His piquant retelling has Adam and Eve meeting up and embracing in the center of a giant kaleidoscopic circle intended as a tribute to Robert Delaunay. Numbers inscribed along the rim of the disk (9, 10, 11) remind you that a clock is ticking, and it is only a matter of time before the dream of Genesis gives way to the heartbreak of the Expulsion.
Did Chagall sense that his Edenic life in Paris was about to end? In August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, artists and poets connected to Orphism signed up to serve or fled Paris for safer shores. Suddenly, the optimistic view of technology that had animated their work seemed obsolete and even ludicrous. It was hard to extol paintings of disks flying through the sky when Paris was under aerial bombardment. It was hard to laud the wonders of technology when its latest feat was the production of machine guns.
Apollinaire, who served as an infantry officer in the war, suffered a shrapnel wound to his head. Kupka fared better. He served as a volunteer and was briefly assisted by his doting wife, Eugenie Kupka, who sneaked into his marching regiment and carried his bag and rifle for him.
As for Robert and Sonia Delaunay, they took refuge from the war in Portugal, setting up makeshift studios in a seaside village in the Porto district, on the north coast. One day in 1916, when her husband happened to be away in Spain, Sonia was stunned when authorities detained her and accused her of espionage. She was charged with sending encoded messages to German U-boats in the Atlantic by way of the colored disks in her paintings.
The charges were eventually dropped, but the anecdote lives on as a reminder of the curiosity and puzzlement that paintings of disks can arouse. Yes, they do convey forceful messages, ones that continue to beam across time and space. If you love modern art, they need no decoding.
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