Gallery · Room 05 · Paris, 1912–1914
Orphism
Painting meant to work like music: rings and disks of pure color, and little or no subject.
Wall text
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 poet and musician of Greek myth, because he believed painting could work like music, built from color and form rather than things seen. Robert used his own word, simultanism.
One 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 contrasting color against each other. Sonia carried the same ideas into textiles, clothing and books.
František Kupka worked along the same lines, and Apollinaire first used the word for his pure painting. Francis Picabia showed Dances at the Spring at the Salon de la Section d'Or in Paris in 1912. Orphism was brief, but it was a key step from Cubism toward abstract art.
