Orphism

Around 1912 Robert and Sonia Delaunay began painting with patches of pure color arranged into harmonious, often circular compositions. The poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire called it Orphism, after Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth, because he believed painting could work like music and move people without depicting anything. Robert preferred his own word, simultanism.

Their source was Michel-Eugène Chevreul's nineteenth-century theory of simultaneous contrast: colors change each other when they sit side by side. Delaunay's disks, such as Homage to Blériot, dedicated to the aviator and aircraft designer Louis Blériot, set rings of complementary color spinning against each other. Sonia carried the same ideas into textiles, clothing and book covers.

Others came close to the circle, including František Kupka and Francis Picabia, who showed Dances at the Spring in Paris in 1912. Orphism was brief, but it was one of the first steps into pure abstraction.