“Harmony and Dissonance” Opens at the Guggenheim Museum
Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms (Formes circulaires), 1930. Oil on canvas, 50 3/4 × 76 3/4 in. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 49.1184. Photo: Kristopher McKay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
On November 8th, the Guggenheim opened its latest exhibition in the rotunda galleries, bringing together a constellation of works by artists grouped under the term “Orphism.” A reference to the Greek bard Orpheus, whose divine creativity was a focal point for a number of artists working in early twentieth-century Paris, “Orphism” was coined by the art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912. In this exhibition, the term encompasses the various approaches to abstraction developed by artists interested in visual simultaneity and the application of scientific theories to the visual arts. Senior Director of Collections and Senior Curator Tracey Bashkoff and Senior Curator Vivien Greene, assisted by Curatorial Assistant Bellara Huang, have crafted a dizzying and vibrant journey into the Orphist movement.
The international cohort of artists in this show (most of whom lived and worked in Paris sometime between 1910 and 1930) created work that spanned multiple media, providing a rich survey of diverse approaches to lyrical abstraction. After meeting iconic Orphists like Francis Picabia and Sonia and Robert Delaunay in the High Gallery, the viewer is led through a balance of recognizable, canonical works (such as Robert Delaunay’s monumental Circular Forms canvas) and more dispersed examples, like Mainie Jellett’s 1938 Painting. The title of the exhibition, Harmony and Dissonance,certainly underscores the narrative of the exhibition, drawing to the forefront the emphasis of many Orphist works on simultaneity and contradiction as visual life forces, part of a “cosmic thrum” that these artists sought to make tangible. Even the show’s most conscious outliers, American painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, who called themselves Synchromists, smoothly demonstrate the kind of “dissonance,” in contexts and visual forms, which this exhibition investigates.
Marc Chagall, Homage to Apollinaire (Hommage à Apollinaire), 1913. Oil on canvas, 78 7/8 × 74 5/8 in. (200.4 × 189.5 cm). Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with support of Vereniging Rembrandt. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Peter Cox, Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Speaking about the exhibition, Bellara Huang emphasized the recontextualization of Apollinaire’s “Orphism” label, and of the relationships—both contemporary and retroactive—amongst the artists and their artworks. “As people in the present consuming art of the past,” remarked Huang, “we affirm this art because we see it as relevant. And we pick and choose from [this art], just as Apollinaire did.” In bringing together artists working within various, sometimes overlapping theoretical frameworks, Harmony and Dissonance aims to subvert a traditional canonical “Orphism” by starting not from a teleological labeling system, but rather from the words of Apollinaire himself. Beyond the complex relationship between critic and artist, the exhibition also explores the play between various artistic media. From painting to sculpture, from poetry to dance, the ramps at the Guggenheim are alive with dialogue. Curator Vivien Greene aptly commented that, for such an interwoven network of artistic experimentation, “Orphism seemed the most capacious term.”
František Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”) (Disques de Newton [Étude pour “La fugue à 2 couleurs”]),1912. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 × 29 in. (100.3 × 73.7 cm). The Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art
These dialogues encompass both actual personal relationships, such as those between the Delaunays, Marc Chagall, and Apollinaire, as well as theoretical relationships, like the overlapping nature of music, color, and cosmic order. Scientific concerns are especially evident in the work of Frantisek Kupka, whose paintings blithely ignore the formal theories of the Delaunays and insist on a linear, softened, and highly symbolic visual language reminiscent of Chagall. Chagall himself is represented in this exhibition by three iconic paintings, one of which, titled Homage to Apollinaire, reiterates the critic’s looming presence. As the primary Orphist tenet, Sonia Delaunay’s work argues strongly for simultaneity: in one bay alone, the viewer encounters long vertical painting, poetry-painting using color as a secondary syntax, a book cover, and a wooden toy box. The works by both Delaunays steal gazes across the rotunda, their brilliance enhanced by a visual volume that reflects contemporary theories of sound. The audio guide offers samples of poetry and early contemporary jazz music to build out this exploration. On the sixth and highest ramp of the rotunda, audio-visual installations culminate this tangle of media, activated by the Guggenheim’s 2024 Poet-in-Residence Meg Day.
Mainie Jellett, Painting, 1938. Oil on canvas, 29 15/16 × 25 7/16 in. (76 × 64.6 cm). National Museums NI, Ulster Museum Collection, Northern Ireland, Donated by the Thomas Haverty Trust. Photo: National Museums NI
The artist whose work speaks loudest to me in this exhibition is Mainie Jellett: an Irish artist working primarily in the 1930s. Her dark blue celestial canvases, luminous forms, and engulfing voids invoke the spiritual aspects of Orphism. In Jellett’s dark and inviting circular imagery, especially in the aforementioned Painting (1938), the themes of Harmony and Dissonance manifest in stark elegance. While early jazz and other experimental music forms were most contemporary with the work of the Orphists, Jellett’s work speaks particularly to the classical European music that was the referent for much of the Orphists’ visual theories. From counterpoint to color theory, this exhibition reconsiders Orphism as its original creators and participants saw it: transnational, transdisciplinary, and transcendental.
