From 8 November 2024 to 9 March 2025, the Guggenheim presents the primary in-depth examination of Orphism, which emerged in Paris amongst a bunch of cosmopolitan artists within the early 1910s—when modifications introduced on by modernity had been radically altering notions of time and house.
Supply: Guggenheim Museum, New York · Picture: Robert Delaunay, “Circular Forms” (1930). Guggenheim Museum, New York
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the time period “Orphism” in 1912 to explain artists who had been shifting away from Cubism towards an summary, multisensory mode of expression. Apollinaire’s idea referenced the Greek mythological poet and lyre participant Orpheus—who swayed nature and challenged demise along with his music—equating the ephemeral abstraction of his music with Orphism’s transcendent character.
Related artists equivalent to Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, and Francis Picabia created kaleidoscopic compositions that captured the simultaneity of contemporary life. Some investigated chromatic consonances and contrasts of their prismatic works, whereas others engaged with the rhythms and syncopations of fashionable music and dance. They drew inspiration from Neo-Impressionism’s shade principle and the Blue Rider group’s philosophies. When pushed to its limits, Orphism meant complete abstraction.
Alongside the formal concord and dissonance associated to paint and sound that underpins Orphist compositions, the exhibition will reveal sociocultural corollaries sparked by transnationalism: the connections that larger mobility fostered between artists from myriad international locations who converged in Paris in addition to the tensions that geographic and cultural dislocations might engender. Concord and Dissonance will make use of Orphism as a beneficiant and elastic class to embrace a spectrum of artists experimenting with abstraction within the early twentieth century. Thus, chosen works by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Mainie Jellett, Fernand Léger, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and others might be amongst these within the presentation. Round 1 / 4 of the exhibition’s works hail from the Guggenheim’s assortment, the very physique of artwork that Frank Lloyd Wright designed the museum to accommodate, aptly honoring the constructing’s sixty fifth anniversary in fall 2024.
