The Brooklyn Rail

Twenty-three of the works in this exhibition were pulled from the Guggenheim’s collection and many, including Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower (Tour Eiffel)(1911, inscribed 1910), underwent some sort of pre-exhibition conservation treatment. František Kupka’s Divertimento I (Divertissement I) (1935) was restored with a nanogel formulation including Nanorestore Gel® Peggy 6 (after Peggy Guggenheim). This in-house conservation work could serve as a metaphor for the exhibition. The curators, Tracey Bashkoff and Vivien Greene, have facilitated a similar phenomenon: previously exhibited paintings appear revitalized, as though we are seeing them for the first time. This is also true of the paintings formerly seen in the Whitney’s Synchromism (1978), the Centre Pompidou’s Robert et Sonia Delaunay (2003), and the Guggenheim’s František Kupka (1975). With phenomenal connoisseurship, comprehensible categories, the inclusion of periphery artists, and the catalogue’s diverse scholarship, Orphism is amplified, and we experience a re-enchantment and new ways of seeing old works.

The designation “Orphism” was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire after Orpheus, the mythological Thracian poet who survived a voyage to Hades to bring us the Orphic Mysteries. Orphism’s mysteries were a voyage into non-figurative “pure painting” that would “act on the soul,” express the universal without a recognizable subject, and create “a new universe independent of the old one.” Newly visible molecular scientific discoveries, along with Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical descriptions of unseen realms, became metaphors for this new abstraction. Apollinaire saw Orphism as spiritually and physically unlimited, engaging all of the senses. In an age of zeppelins and biplanes, this was a new aeronautics, traveling from inner to outer space.

Orphism has often been regarded as a temporary short-lived movement grafted onto Cubism as “Orphic Cubism.” Many of the participants did not consider themselves to be Orphists. The young American upstarts Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, ambitious to achieve notoriety comparable to the Futurists, started their own movement called Synchronism. František Kupka, the odd man out—naturalist, trance medium, and Theosophist—ridiculed them. Sonia and Robert Delaunay, the color theorists, defined themselves using the term simultanisme. After Cubism and Orphism, the suave Franco-Spaniard Francis Picabia motored on to Zurich and was among those who started the Dada movement.

Bards, poets, musicians, scientists, and dancers inspired the Orphists. Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, has accordion folds like a train schedule. Cendrars’s multisensory Trans-Siberian journey and Delaunay’s simultaneous colors merge, and the result is the revolutionary “first simultaneous book.” Here, it hangs on the wall like a sacred relic for visiting poets.

Unlike Orpheus, who was torn apart by dancing maenads, for Orphism the fragmentation and the kinesthetic sensations of Latin tango dancers from the Parisian haunts become part of the art. Jean Metzinger’s Danseuse au café (1912), Alexander Archipenko’s Médrano II (1913–14), and Sonia Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier (Tango au Bal Bullier ; Mouvement, couleur, profondeur, dans Bullier) (1913) and Composition danseuse (1916) are stunning examples. Archipenko’s Médrano II (pulled from the collection) looks fresh, like it was made yesterday, and Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier is a showstopper. Gino Severini’s Dancer = Propeller = Sea (1915) depicts not the dancer but the movement, relating it to the movement of an airplane or express train. The American dancer Loïe Fuller captured the Orphic spirit by combining movement with technical invention, pioneering multi-colored stage lighting techniques to illuminate the swirling robes of her “Serpentine Dance.”

Kupka, a practitioner of what came to be known as “Mystical Orphism” by scholars like Virginia Spate, was a trance medium and member of the Society for Psychical Research. A reader of Theosophy, Kupka was inspired by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater’s Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation (1905), in which thoughts and sound produce form and color in the human aura. His theosophic visions inspired his painting Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”) (1912) and the small pastel Study for “Disks of Newton” (ca. 1911–12). Both of these masterpieces explore his prismatic explorations inspired by light coming through stained glass church windows. Kupka believed that the true reality was a spiritual one, and that the mission of art was to restore consciousness of this invisible reality. Both Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky (the latter an important point of reference for Orphism) sought a synthesis of the scientific and the mystical, the visual and aural realms, and transcendent possibilities with abstraction. Kandinsky and Pavel Florensky, the scientist, theologian, and art historian, advocated the creation of artworks that would stimulate a new kind of scientific and spiritual cognition.

The Delaunays were fascinated by the immaterial energies of light and believed light could emanate from within the painting rather than being reflected off objects. Observing the streetlamps being installed on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Sonia Delaunay captured the pulsating energies of modern life with circular halo paintings like Electric Prisms (1914). Natalia Goncharova’s The Electric Lamp (1913) also reflects her fascination with electric lights, radioactive energy, and ultraviolet rays.

Here, the curators expanded Apollinaire’s list of artists to include foreigners not often associated with the movement. The Irish artist Mainie Jellett’s Composition (ca. 1932) and Painting (1938), Eduardo Viana’s The Uprising of the Dolls (1916), Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’s Study B (1913), Franz Marc’s Broken Forms (1914), Giacomo Balla’s Mercury Passing before the Sun (1914), and David Bomberg’s In the Hold (ca. 1913–14) are a few of the memorable inclusions. The Americans Marsden Hartley, Patrick Henry Bruce, Thomas Hart Benton, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell hold their own along with posters documenting their Synchronism movement. Thomas Hart Benton had seen the 1914 Synchromist exhibition at the Carroll Galleries and the work seen here, Bubbles (1914–17) was his attempt at the style. Missing, because it is now too fragile to travel, is Morgan Russell’s eleven-foot, giant, Synchromy in Orange: To Form (1913–14) which was meant to blow the competition out of the water at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants.

The catalogue, edited by Vivien Greene—which takes a holistic approach to Orphism—builds on Virginia Spate’s 1979 Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910–1914, long considered the movement’s bible. In the Guggenheim catalogue, we encounter a diverse group of scholars. “Orphic Sparagmos: Poetry and the Fragmentation of Modernity,” by Effie Rentzou, and “The Belle Époque: In Between Heroism and Modernity,” by Elizabeth Everton, are memorable among an excellent collection of essays. The exhibition and the catalogue function as a pair, giving us a fresh look at the subject. Together they provide a more comprehensible and pleasurable update to a formerly confusing movement. Seeing the work in the museum’s alcoves, rather than dwarfed by huge white walls, adds to the pleasure. This exhibition comes highly recommended.