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František Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”) (Disques de Newton [Étude pour “La fugue à 2 couleurs”]),1912. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 29 inches. The Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy the Guggenheim. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumNovember 8, 2024–March 9, 2025 New York

The bouillabaisse that was early–twentieth-century modernism in Europe began, appropriately enough (considering that Provençal soup’s roots), in southern France with Fauvism, then exploded with Cubism in Paris, before spinning off multiple movements in many nations. My favorites were brief, delirious, and inceptive: Italian Futurism; still underappreciated Purism encompassing Gerald Murphy but largely seen as a Le Corbusier dalliance and stepping stone toward International Style architecture; Precisionism in Pennsylvania; and finally Orphism and its American cousin-once-removed, Synchromism. The last two are receiving a welcome airing at the Guggenheim in an exhibition with a title like a Pink Floyd album, and art aiming for similarly multi-sensorial trippy and sonorous feelings. It is a single-venue show of eighty-two works in multiple media by twenty-six artists, almost a quarter of which are from the Guggenheim’s collection; most have been there since the museum’s inception, if infrequently on view. It is curated by Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, the former admitting in the enlightening catalogue that since Guillaume Apollinaire’s coining of the mytho-chromatic term “Orphism” in 1912 to characterize the work of Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia, the movement has seemed amorphous, its circular, swelling, and pulsating coloristic non-naturalistic forms appealing to a broad range of artists. Unlike the more rarified and focused conceptual visuality of Cubism, these artists sought multi-sensory experiences (what the Delaunays called “simultaneity”), and something along the lines of our own spectacle art—in a way it is not too far a stretch to say that Olafur Eliasson is their inheritor, the last Orphist.

Because of the similarly circular movement of the viewer up Frank Lloyd Wright’s ivory corkscrew and a generously spaced hang, the show manages to feel more substantial than its modest number of works. It begins with Robert Delaunay’s grayish window views of the Eiffel Tower and Paris and Duchamp’s nudes and proto-Large Glass pictures of 1912, both artists impacted by the monochromatic proclivities of Picasso and Braque’s Analytic Cubism. It picks up visceral and variegated steam with František Kupka’s works on succeeding ramp levels and Robert Delaunay’s subsequent grand pictures that come away from the window and enter the world of color theory, discs, astronomy, manned flight, and rugby. His Ukrainian Jewish wife, Sonia Delaunay, subject of a comprehensive and canon-breaching retrospective across Central Park at the Bard Graduate Center last spring, is well-represented here in printed poems, boxes, paintings, and dresses. Other artists who hopped on the Orphist color wheel include the Russians Natalia Goncharova and Marc Chagall, Ukrainian Alexander Archipenko, and Moscow-trained Finn Léopold Survage, stressing the pan-European nature of contributors to the Orphist idiom. While they represent a general tendency, anchored in exhibits at the time in Paris and Berlin, they do not necessarily cohere as a unified whole.

But that is okay, for the show soars on the upper ramps, where the selection expands from the usual modernist characters and introduces lesser-known artists who flirted briefly, but memorably, with the Orphist mantra. These include two Portuguese painters, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Eduardo Viana. They show the way that Orphism could be transmitted into a kind of schematic design using similar Delaunay color schemes: a little more acidic in de Souza-Cardoso and with small-brush shading closer to Juan Gris’s Cubism; and Vianna who is a kind of cross between the Delaunays and Umberto Boccioni. There are surprising works by Americans Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Patrick Henry Bruce that have similarities to ideas in the Orphist universe but were not major parts of these artists’ overall bodies of work. The best Americans are the self-fashioned and Orphist-rejecting Synchromists in Paris, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who developed a winning pictorial muscularity of coloristic forms that drew on sources as disparate and unlikely as Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens.

The penultimate bay of the show features two revelatory works from the 1930s by the Dublin modernist Mainie Jellett who worked with the Salon Cubist Albert Gleizes and developed a broadly Christian abstract art that paralleled the formation of an independent Ireland. She painted with a twinkling, dark tonality with heavy emphasis on cobalt blue, ultramarine, and other deep jewel tones, abjuring the pastel colors or high end of the rainbow tones of Orphism. Jellett painted shifting and fragmented frames within the frames, in compositions with an interesting centrality marked by slashing lines of color and, in Painting, from 1938, a modified Synthetic Cubist use of neo-Impressionist dots for highlights. These striking works read more as mechanical gears and shafts and shifting clicking forms than anything as diaphanous and celestial as the Delaunays were pursuing. Purported spirituality notwithstanding, the artist developed her own distinctive non-objective abstraction in works that accessed the by-then-receding Orphist tradition, and at the same time introduced a color scheme far more related to the deep blues and jewel tones of Medieval stained glass. Someone needs to put together a show.

What is missing from the display and catalogue is a sense of where this all comes from, for it is not just Fauvism and Cubism. It is clear that the importance of music and poetry to these artists, both classical and contemporary, is a holdover from Symbolism. Popular dance is also key—the tango as in Sonia Delaunay’s fabulous and panoramic Bal Bullier (1913), two-step, links with jazz—as detailed in a catalogue essay by Nell Andrew. But we should think back even further to the way that American “Synchromism,” or the exploration of emotional content via color, form, tension, and music played with the same concepts inherent in the British Aesthetic Movement dating to the 1860s. Russell and Macdonald-Wright took the tentatively abstract concepts of James McNeill Whistler, George Frederic Watts, and Albert Moore to the extreme, making non-figurative works that would connect with a modern sensibility. The various political views of the artists are largely elided in the display, but Elizabeth Everton and David Max Horowitz address the politics of the period in their catalogue essays. Some ancillary works feel neglected: Goncharova’s distinctive and techno Electric Lamp (1913) from the Pompidou goes undiscussed in the catalogue (although it gets a short wall text), as does David Bomberg’s important and large In the Hold from Tate (ca. 1913–14), misleadingly lumped with the Synchromists. Although he paralleled the Vorticists, Bomberg was not part of any movement, but he was aware of what was going on in Paris. This astonishing picture with its grid of sixty-four squares, dominance of black shapes (a tone not often found in the Orphist pictures), slashing lines, and inscrutable imagery makes it an outlier. Bomberg is a great artist not often seen in New York since the Jewish Museum’s Immigrant Generation: Jewish Artists in Britain 1900–1945 show in 1983, and this masterpiece is wholly unknown in America. It also feels out of place in this exhibition due to its angular kaleidoscopic mode, and visuality that emphasizes labor, in addition to its resistance to a pleasing prismatic color palette. It has more affinity with Odili Donald Odita than the Orphists.

Despite its at times thrilling visual diffusion, the show concludes with Robert Delaunay’s Circular Forms of 1930, a founding work of the Guggenheim collection and a picture that could easily have been painted much earlier but, in the end, encapsulates the movement, loose as it was: circularity, a blend of radiant colors, celestial ideas dovetailed with telescoping, kaleidoscopes, camera lenses, suffusing light, and the sense of visual splay without landscape in the absence of a horizon. This is in contradistinction to his earlier framed and crystalline Parisian views and images of airplanes, rugby players, and Ferris wheels. In the end, the work becomes insular, a harbinger of the grand abstraction that would rise in New York after the Second World War, in fields of pulsating manipulated color.

Jason Rosenfeld Ph.D., is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College. He was co-curator of the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.