In the pantheon of the early 20th-century avant-garde, Orphism -- the subject of a sweeping but diffuse survey at the Guggenheim Museum -- is rare among isms in that it remains relatively understudied and misapprehended, at least in comparison to modernist cognates like Futurism, Vorticism, and Cubism. The Cubists' kaleidoscopic unmooring of geometry from perspectival propriety inspired Orphism's drive toward "pure painting" -- pictorial form and color liberated from figurative duties -- but, confusingly enough, the movement's name is bound up with literary allusion. Coined in 1912 by French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, it evokes Orpheus, the mythical Greek prophet and musician. For Apollinaire, music suggested a new model for modern painting distilled to its purest potential state, unbeholden to narrative exposition.
Though developed almost exclusively in Paris, Orphism involved artists of wide-ranging extraction and nationality, and the Orphic painters' concern for "pure" form and color resonated with other developments in nonobjective painting from Germany to Italy to the United States. "Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930" goes a long way in contextualizing some of those parallels and intersections. Enlivened by an impressive array of loans, the exhibition sets into relief Orphism's specific aesthetic achievements as well as its amorphous taxonomy.
As the wall text notes, the painters most closely affiliated with Orphism -- Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia, and František Kupka -- never adapted Apollinaire's term of designation as their own. They produced no manifesto or writing in its name, and the Delaunays, for their part, used the term "simultanism" to describe their work. But formal ambitions and optical effects undeniably united a few artists of disparate origins and diverging aesthetic trajectories, even if briefly.
A gallery tucked within the first curl of the Guggenheim's ramp sets four core artists' interrelated efforts into incandescent relief via one large-scale canvas each, produced in their most respectively "orphic" guise. Though the residues of representation persist in some of the paintings -- the pulsing heavenly bodies of Robert Delaunay's Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913), for example, or the currents rippling from the center of Kupka's Localization of Graphic Motifs (1912-13) -- their imagery is chiefly concerned with rhythm and texture. Empirical reality does not dictate the hallucinatory swirl of color or gyration of form in works that appear derived instead from celestial inspiration or interior visions.
Just around the corner, Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 28 (1912) reminds viewers of the extent to which musical composition informed certain pictorial experiments during these years (while also registering the explicit embrace of Robert Delaunay's work by the Munich-based Blaue Reiter group formed around Kandinsky). Simultaneity in music substitutes a polyphony of chords instead of a linear succession -- the kind of effect pursued in many of the works on display. As art historian Nell Andrew writes in the exhibition catalog, the indissoluble coupling of music and dance proved influential in Orphism's pictorial tendencies (much in the way that figure and ground often prove indistinguishable in Orphic imagery).
The principal ambitions of these painters were optical rather than intellectual. The Delaunays paid close attention to post-Impressionist innovations by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as the scientific color theories of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. But the "contrasts" out of which they constructed their images were not merely ocular or chromatic. Orphic imagery responded affectively to the conditions of modern life in the metropolis and its increasingly cinematic, commercial, and mechanized sights and sounds.
Sonia Delaunay's Electric Prisms (1913), with its titular nod to advances in electricity still relatively new at the time, underscores the decidedly urban tenor of Orphic painting in this regard. Poets like Apollinaire and the Futurists incorporated similar phenomena into their writing, both thematically and typographically, and Sonia collaborated in the same vein with Blaise Cendrars, another modernist poet resident in Paris at the time. Punctuated by a stylized Eiffel Tower, her luminous watercolor abstractions unfurl alongside (and bleed into) verse by Cendrars, whose "Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France" -- hanging in a vertical display in one of the Guggenheim's small bays -- explores transcontinental train travel during the first Russian Revolution, in 1905.
The Eiffel Tower recurs as a sign of urban life in various paintings by Robert Delaunay, where it becomes increasingly dematerialized. Even at its most abstract, his imagery refuses to give up the ghost of figuration. And the exhibition highlights with great flair his work's contiguity to that of other contemporaries. The corpulent clouds in Delaunay's Tour Rouge (1911-12), for instance, bear no closer equivalents than those painted by Fernand Léger during the same years, visible across the Guggenheim's atrium in a rendering of Parisian rooftops. The outsize prismatic clock that frames the figures in Marc Chagall's Homage to Apollinaire (1911-12) likewise rhymes unmistakably with the Delaunays' disks from the same period, just as Chagall's depictions of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian windows resonate with Robert Delaunay's series on the same motifs.
The show's attention to personal and professional collaborations is enlightening. The Delaunays' influence on the painters Eduardo Viana and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso -- and the echo of Portuguese "local color" on their own canvases in turn -- stands out in this regard. But as the exhibition progresses, some juxtapositions lose their punch, as well as the larger argument about Orphism's precise significance and resonance. Poignant clusters of works become diluted by a series of rather oblique inclusions. The presence of early Cubist works by Marcel Duchamp make sense, given his affiliation with Picabia. By contrast, paintings by Jean Metzinger, Marsden Hartley, David Bomberg, Natalia Goncharova, and the sculpture of Alexander Archipenko prove confusing in their inclusion, and the same can be said of the Futurist works by Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Vorticist, Rayonist, Cubist, and Futurist painting all evince some shared elements with Orphic abstraction, but the inclusion of works from various movements might leave the uninitiated visitor in doubt as to Orphism's precise content, contours, or consequence.
About the work of Archipenko, Apollinaire proclaimed that the artist sought "above all the purity of forms," attaining not simply a melody but "a harmony." The same might be said of all the artists in this show. Yet in placing so many tendencies under the aegis of Orphism, the exhibition erases its actual edges, such as they were, as it attempts to define them. This may aim to reflect the malleability of the designation itself, but it also risks rendering Orphism a bit of everything -- and, hence, nothing in particular.
The show's extending the Orphic enterprise into the 1930s results in a similar slackness. Aside from a few sparse reprisals by Delaunay and Kupka between the two world wars in Europe, Orphism essentially petered out by 1914, even as its innovations resonated in other experiments. Paintings by the American Synchromist painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell made between 1913 and 1917 receive their due, and Thomas Hart Benton's Bubbles (1914-17) reveals the temptations of nonobjective painting even for the most unlikely artists by the mid-1910s. The arresting, electric blue of a work by Mainie Jellett (1938) certainly corresponds with the nearby Painting for Contemplation by the Cubist Albert Gleizes (1942). But focusing on purely formal (and belated) resonances hardly helps elucidate an already loose and fugitive movement. In spite of such shortcomings, the show assembles an impressive spectrum of works, and sets into entrancing relief the confluence of nonobjective artists in Paris on the eve of the First World War. Even when its juxtapositions appear strained, various individual paintings gain new light -- and hue -- in this exhibition's vibrant polyphony.