ORPHISM

French Orphisme, trend in Cubist painting that gave priority to colour. The movement was named in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose use of the word Orphic recalls both the Symbolist painters' use of the term Orphic art in reference to Paul Gauguin's orchestration of colour and the poetry of Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer. Among the painters working in this style, Apollinaire noted Robert Delaunay (q.v.), Fernand Lger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In the attempt to approximate music, Delaunay and his wife, Sonia, led the way in transforming the visual into abstract colour harmonies. One of the resources Delaunay used to arrive at a way of integrating colour and Cubism was a book on simultaneous contrasts (De la loi du contraste simultan des couleurs, 1839), by the chemist Michel-Eugne Chevreul. Unlike the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who had employed these theories during the 1880s, Delaunay was interested in applying them in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his abstract work Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks (191213; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), superimposed circles of colour have their own rhythm and movement. Another painter associated with Orphism was Frantiek Kupka, a Czech who lived in Paris. Possibly Kupka was aware of Delaunay's disk paintings when he painted his Disks of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors) in 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). As the musical analogy implicit in the title suggests, the vibrating colour orchestrations on the canvas seem to create visual music. It was Delaunay's canvases, however, that deeply impressed August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, who visited his Paris studio in 1912; this exposure had a decisive influence on their subsequent work. Orphism also exerted an influence on the development of German Cubism.