Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism at the NYC Guggenheim.

By Elle Borissow

Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930 (November 8th 2024-March 9th 2025) at the New York Guggenheim, and the accompanying publication of essays, were remarkable as the first comprehensive examination of the Orphist avant-garde wholistically. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, the display’s aim was to map a “constellation of artists,” working at the turn of the twentieth century, inspired by a shared set of socio-political developments – and to appreciate the differing, yet interrelated aesthetics of Orphic abstraction’s diffracted nature.

Ascending the Guggenheim’s notorious spiral, and featuring more than ninety works across various media, Harmony & Dissonance explored the roots and development of Orphism as a movement.  Fundamentally influenced by the unfolding developments of modernity, having emerged alongside Cubism in response to a rapidly urbanising metropolis, the word Orphism was ascribed to an assortment of European Avant-gardes by Guillaume Apollinare, in a nod to the musical bard Orpheus and the lyrical, sonorous quality of their polychromatic works. However, functioning as an umbrella term of sorts, the insinuation of a linear or unified movement is a misconception - Apollinaire’s categorisation of a collective ‘Orphist movement’ recognises broad currents, and a reciprocal transnational network of artists: but the struggle for distinction on the modern stage was rife.  One such example was the “transnational reverberations” of what Sonia and Robert Delaunay described as Simultanism, which the Harmony & Dissonance exhibition linked with the Synchomists who were working in New York (Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright) during the same period. The intent of the Synchromists was to build upon the idea of the artist couple, endowing a synaesthetic multi-sensorial element to their colour-contrasts. Synchromists Russell and Macdonald-Wright’s sonorous abstractions sought to evoke highly particular notes from a musical scale - as opposed to the comparative musicalism or eneral sense of lyricism we see in the work of the Delaunays. Simultanism, by contrast, was was informed by the French chemist M. E. Chevreul’s 1839 theory On the Law of Simultaneous Contrasts of Colours [De la loi du Contrast Simultané des Couleurs], which resulted in experiments focused more on a general experience of movement about the social metropolis than ascribing specific vibrations of colour to a musical scale.

Figure 1: Robert Delaunay, Formes Circulaire [Circular Forms], oil on canvas, 67.3 x 109.8 cm, 1930.

We can consider the effects of these two facets of the Orphist movement through Robert Delaunay’s Formes Circulaires (fig. 1, 1930) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s Abstraction on a Spectrum (Organisation 5) (fig. 2, 1914). By arranging a composition of concentric technicolour disks, Delaunay segments his canvas along geometric planes. His committment to an ideology of “purity” or a universal abstract “language” of colour is notable, particularly with regard to the carefully balanced and harmonious composition which recalls in its concentric ‘disk’ shapes his radical earlier work, The First Disk (1913) - “pulsating and vibrating with radical promise,” the disk has “sometimes seemed to presage everything yet go nowhere.” Likewise, Formes Circulaires is seemingly devoid of subject - its title referencing only the paired back geometry of its composition. In relation to the artist’s interest in neo-Impressionism and a desire to promote a “scientific aesthetic” of painting, we might also consider the sensory affect Delaunay achieves with these atom-like structures which seem to radiate heat, light and energy. Standing before Formes Circulaire, its joyful energy is indeed quite powerful - perhaps even explosive; and yet paradoxically, also very still.

Macdonald-Wright’s Abstraction on Spectrum arguably achieves a more direct kineticism in its fluidity and overlapping of hazily deliniated geometric shapes. It is as though his paintbrush frienziedly conducts music, vibrating up and down; blurring borders and echoeing shapes. Formally we can think about how the artist seems to ‘paint’ the music and evoke the emotional experience of its auditory reception itself here — a common aim, among European abstractionists at the turn of the twentieth century, due to Music’s percieved higher status as a self-expressive and wholly abstract (thereby non-illlusionistic and “honest”) art form. Keen to galvanise a unique niche amidst a crowded modern art scene in Paris, however, Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell upon their establishment of the movmeent in the USA, wanted to make clear their difference as Synchromists from Orphism: their manifesto prescribing a “us[e] of colour to evoke volumetric forms, and through these forms, compositional tensions and powerful emotions.” Therein, the distinguishing features of their painting became “variations of hue, value, saturation, luminosity,” and transparency. The element of transparency is particularly visible in Abstraction on Spectrum, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Macdonald-Wright’s washier use of oil paint. Though whilst the artists insisted on Synchromism’s diveregence on this point from Orphism and the parallel  experiments of the Delaunays, which to their mind "followed the Impressionist tradition of focusing on complementary colour contrasts,” French critics remained dubious, calling it an “incomplete departure.” They certainly do seem maintain considerable overlap.

Figure 2: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Abstraction on Spectrum (Organisation 5), oil on canvas, 1914.

Harmony & Dissonance claims to have looked through an “Orphist lens;” each artist differing yet responding to the shared thread of the “modern metropolis” – velocity and colour encompassed paint; collage; music; fashion – advertisement posters; sculpture, poetry and bookbindings. The list seems endless. With a particular interest in mapping the ‘ephemera’ and transmedial manifestations of Orphism, the Guggenheim’s recent exhibition might be considered fo have achieved a valuable sense of motion itself, having clarified a web of compmlex transnational exchange. Quite stark, in opposition, to the neighbouring permanent displays of Oprhists like Robert Delaunay and Frantizek Kupka at the Museum of Modern Art, whose narrative priority appeared much more to be that of the masculinist ‘artist-genius.’ The MoMA’s curation, though plastered in a technicolour patchwork arguably quite ‘simultaneous’ in appearance, was comparatively static. Spatially confined to a corner - void of the contextualisation Orphism’s complexity requires - MoMA’s Orphic luminosity lurked in the monumental shadow of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) next door — the entire movement merely a chip off the Cubist block.

And so, with this vast variety in mind, we might wonder what is Orphism? How can these distinct yet interwoven threads inform a collective avant-garde? Are we convinced of Orphism’s offshoots as ‘distinct’ entities?

In speaking to the Delaunays’ notion of Simultanism, broadly it is Orphism’s integral simultaneity and foundation of juxtapositions which makes it so versatile, and equally difficult to define. Its transcendence of boundaries – material, ideological, dimensional and acoustic – asserting a challenge to its viewer, or indeed consumer in the context of modernity’s capitalism, to bring a mindset which is at once flexible, and sensitive — alogical, yet considered; and vitally, capable of appreciating the fundamental multiplicity of an aesthetic which speaks to endless reem modernity’s terms and conditions. In many ways, Orphism’s fragmented reverberations still ring true in our present moment of late-stage modernity and industrialisation: wherein we are a global culture striving for non-mutually-exclusive ‘and’s, rather than ‘or’s or restrictive ‘if’s.

Bibliography:

Bashkoff, Tracey. “The Reign of Orpheus is Beginning,” in Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris 1910-1930, Guggenheim Publications, 2024.

Greene, Vivien (ed.). Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris 1910-1930, Guggenheim Publications, 2024.

Leja, Michael. “Morgan Russell and Synchromism: Mistaking a Tiger for a Zebra,” in Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris 1910-1930, Guggenheim Publications, 2024.

Ramalingam, Chitra. “Robert Delaunay: Scientific Aesthetics,” in Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris 1910-1930, Guggenheim Publications, 2024.