Orphism Movement in Guggenheim Museum

The architect of the Guggenheim Museum in New York is Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most renowned architects of the 20th century. The museum, completed in 1959, is celebrated for its unique design, featuring a spiraling structure that contrasts with the grid of Manhattan's streets.

The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937. Initially focused on non-objective art (art without direct visual references), it expanded to include diverse styles and movements, such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual Art.

Permanent Collection: The collection includes works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Brancusi, and more. It's home to masterpieces spanning Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

The Guggenheim building itself is as much a work of art as the exhibitions inside. The continuous spiral ramp and natural light enhance the viewing experience.

About the Exhibition

Featuring over 90 artworks in the museum’s iconic rotunda, this major exhibition examines the vibrant abstract art of Orphism. It explores the transnational movement’s developments in Paris, addressing the impact dance, music, and poetry had on the art, among other themes.

Orphism emerged in the early 1910s, when the innovations brought about by modern life were radically altering conceptions of time and space. Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, investigating the transformative possibilities of color, form, and motion. Selected works by artists including Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Mainie Jellett, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, and by the Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, are on view.

Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 is organized by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Director of Collections and Senior Curator, and Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, with the support of Bellara Huang, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions.

The obsession with color that characterizes the Orphist mindset can largely be attributed to chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, whose studies on adjacent colors, and how they affect one another, visually revolutionized the use of color in art. Building on Chevreul’s principles, the Delaunays—Robert and Sonia—developed their theory of “simultaneity.” This theory sought to capture multiple perspectives and moments within a single painting. Robert’s Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913)—a circular canvas exploding with reds, greens, yellows, and blues on view in the museum’s High Gallery—underscores this need to convey immediacy.

Artists associated with Orphism, such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Frantisek Kupka, and Francis Picabia, sought to channel the innovations of the early twentieth century -which radically altered how people lived and thought - by capturing the simultaneity of modern existence in their art. Newer, faster modes of transport and communication changed conceptions of time and space; the aerial perspectives of early flight offered manifold viewpoints; and electric lighting animated the texture of the city streets at night. In their work, these artists also made tangible the dynamic rhythms of popular music and dance, especially early jazz and tango, by articulating the multiple physical sensations and movements occurring synchronously in cafes and dance halls.

Their French Neo-Impressionist precursors had applied these techniques in shimmering 'pointillist' paintings consisting of individual dots of color, and the artists involved with Orphism took them forward.

Alongside the harmony and dissonance related to color, sound, and movement underpinning Orphism, the exhibition explores the harmony and dissonance sparked by transnationalism or the crossing of national boundaries.

SIMULTANEOUS CONTRASTS: SUN AND MOON

Robert Delaunay embarked upon a new series ''circular form'' that centers on the sun, the moon, or as in this painting, both celestial bodies. For those works, Delaunay continued to rely on scientific studies delving into chromatics, optics and perception.

EDTAONISL (ECCLESIASTIC)

Encapsulates a multiplicity of Francis Picabia's interests on a grand scale, including his preoccupation with dance and more broadly, kinesthesis - or the physical sense of a body in motion. Picabia painted this cacophonous composition after his transformative 1913 trip to New York. The subtitle. "Ecclesiastic" points to a priest the artist espied on board the liner intently observing the dancers. Picabia rendered these experiences in a synesthetic abstraction of riotous forms merging dance, music, the ship's movement, and more.

RED EIFFEL TOWER

Embodying French technological advancement, the Eiffel Tower was constructed for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. It continued to capture the attention of painters and poets attempting to define the essence of modernity during the early twentieth century. In his first series in the early twentieth century. Robert Delaunay presented the tower and its surroundings from various perspectives and as seen from windows framed by curtains (or by buildings curved like drapery). As poet Blaise Cendrars explained: "He truncated it and he tilted it... to disclose all of its three hundred dizzying meters of height." Delaunay rendered his stylized Red Eiffel Tower to emphasize color and contour.

Atmospherics - smoke, clouds and streaming light - activate the simultaneous interplay of the structure's angles and planes as it appears to lumber forward, an evocation of progress.

WINDOWS OPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY 1st PART, 3rd MOTIF

While Cubism inspired Robert Delaunay's fragmentation of form, grid organization, and the oval format of this canvas, the artist abandoned the movement's monochromatic, tactile planes in favor of the application of diaphanous, prismatic color. As Delaunay wrote in 1913 "Line is limitation. Color gives depth - not perspectival, not successive, but simultaneous depth - as well as form and movement."

This body of work inspired Guillaume Apollinaire to write his nonlinear poem "The Windows."

THE CARDIFF TEAM

Contemporaneously represents dynamic rugby players in action, icons of the Paris cityscape such as the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wheel, and references to aeronautics.

The painting depicts a game where a rugby team from Cardiff, in Wales, is participating, facing an unnamed adversary, possibly a French team. Six rugby players are shown in the lower part of the work, in sporting attires and in action, with their brightly colored jerseys made of crude lines. Three players have the same white and blue stripped jerseys, while the other three sportsmen belong to the opposite team. One of them is seen jumping while catching the ball. On the upper level of the painting there is an advertising poster with the slogan “Astra” and behind it some of the great inventions and creations of the time: a biplane, a rollercoaster and the Eiffel Tower. The name Delaunay can be seen at the bottom of the tower in a sort of advertisement, with the names of the cities of New York and Paris below.

PHYSICAL CULTURE

Portraying the manifestations and sensations of motion preoccupied Francis Picabia and other artists engaged with Orphism. By the time Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes exhibited canvases featuring rugby players at Paris's 1913 Salon des Independents, the physicality and rhythm embodied in the exercise had captivated French society. La Culture Physique concerning the mind-body connection and extolling dance as sport. In this work by the same name, Picabia arrived at a wholly abstract means to represent kinesthetic experience.

DISKS OF NEWTON

The self-proclaimed mystic Frantisek Kupka summoned generative power through a series of pulsating chromatic rings, radiating from red to violet, green to blue, that collide in luminous circling passages. The title references seventeenth-century physicist Isaac Newton's discovery that the seven colors of the spectrum unite to produce the sun's white light.

ACCELERATION = DREAM, FIBONACCI NUMBERS IN NEON AND MOTORCYCLE PHANTOM. 1972

Mario Merz has taken a motorcycle and attached horns to its handles. The vehicle leaves in its track a logical series of neon numbers. The vehicle leaves in its track a logical series of neon numbers. Part industrial machine, part livestock, part mathematical representation, the work is an absurd version of a ubiquitous mode of transportation, especially in the artist's home country of Italy. "Acceleration of numbers equals acceleration of wheels equals acceleration on space"

IN THE HOLD

David Bomberg considered himself separate from any artistic movement but shared affinities with several. In 1913, while immersed in the London vanguard, he frequented Paris, where he witnessed the modernist experimentation occurring across the Channel. Raised by Polish Jewish immigrants of London's working-class East End, Bomberg drew subject matter from the area for his work in the early 1910s. Bomberg proclaimed: "I want to translate the life of a great city, its motion, its machinery, into an art that shall not be photo-graphic, but expressive."

In this spirit, the Orphists aimed to express the essence of modernity itself—fast-moving, energized, and often chaotic—through their art. Using abstract forms and vibrant colors, they captured the sensations of new speedy transportation systems, electric light, and increasingly mechanized city life. They created a visual language that echoed the era’s technological advances and transformed art into a sensory experience.