Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930

With beautiful color plates and essays written by curators and scholars in the field of art history, this book accompanies an exhibition at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire invented the term “Orphism” (borrowing from the name of the Greek god of music, Orpheus) to describe artworks that were moving away from the cubist style by utilizing a vocabulary of colorful kaleidoscopic geometric forms to express sensations of time, space, color, light, and movement in visual equivalents of musical harmonies. This art form allied poetry, painting, and music with one another and modernity itself. These artists worked in often similar visual styles expressing a sensory abstraction of color and form through pulsating rhythmic prisms, circles, and discs that were often meant to evoke a spiritual dimension. Some of these artists were French—Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia—but many of the artists who experimented with the visual vocabulary of Orphism reflected the transnational artistic community of Paris. These included, among others: Ukraine-born artists Sonia Delaunay and Alexander Archipenko; František Kupka, born in Opočno, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic); and American artist Morgan Russell.