CategoriesStyles and Movements
Orphism
A brief Paris tendency of about 1912–14 that filled Cubist structure with bright, rhythmic colour and moved towards pure abstraction.
No works indexed yet · 6 related artists
No open-access works for Orphism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Around 1912 a few painters in Paris took the fractured planes of Cubism and flooded them with prismatic colour, moving towards pure abstraction. Robert Delaunay built his Windows series (1912) from overlapping transparent patches, then moved to rings and discs of contrasting hues that seem to spin, as in Homage to Blériot (1914). He called his approach simultaneity, drawing on Michel-Eugène Chevreul's colour theory. Sonia Delaunay carried the same rhythms into textiles, clothing and book design.
František Kupka reached abstraction by his own route, showing Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours (1912) at the Salon d'Automne. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire grouped these artists, with Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia, under the name Orphism, after the singer of Greek myth, because their painting aimed at effects as non-descriptive as music. It ended with the First World War but inspired the American Synchromists and the German painters August Macke and Franz Marc.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Outsider Art
Pattern and Decoration Movement
Pictorialism
Pittura Metafisica
Pointillism
Political Minimalism
Political Pop
Pop and Contemporary Pop
Pop Art
Post-'70s Ego Generation
Post-Impressionism
Post-Internet Art
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Post-War American Art
Post-War European Art
Post-World War I European Classicism
Post-World War II School of Paris
Postminimalism
Pre-Raphaelites
