Guggenheim Museum presents “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930”

From 8 November 2024 to 9 March 2025, the Guggenheim presents the first in-depth examination of Orphism, which emerged in Paris among a group of cosmopolitan artists in the early 1910s—when changes brought on by modernity were radically altering notions of time and space.

Source: Guggenheim Museum, New York · Image: Robert Delaunay, “Circular Forms” (1930). Guggenheim Museum, New York

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term “Orphism” in 1912 to describe artists who were moving away from Cubism toward an abstract, multisensory mode of expression. Apollinaire’s concept referenced the Greek mythological poet and lyre player Orpheus—who swayed nature and challenged death with his song—equating the ephemeral abstraction of his music with Orphism’s transcendent character.

Associated artists such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, František Kupka, and Francis Picabia created kaleidoscopic compositions that captured the simultaneity of modern life. Some investigated chromatic consonances and contrasts in their prismatic works, while others engaged with the rhythms and syncopations of popular music and dance. They drew inspiration from Neo-Impressionism’s color theory and the Blue Rider group’s philosophies. When pushed to its limits, Orphism meant total abstraction.

Alongside the formal harmony and dissonance related to color and sound that underpins Orphist compositions, the exhibition will reveal sociocultural corollaries sparked by transnationalism: the connections that greater mobility fostered between artists from myriad countries who converged in Paris as well as the tensions that geographic and cultural dislocations could engender. Harmony and Dissonance will employ Orphism as a generous and elastic category to embrace a spectrum of artists experimenting with abstraction in the early twentieth century. Thus, selected works by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Mainie Jellett, Fernand Léger, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and others will be among those in the presentation. Around a quarter of the exhibition’s works hail from the Guggenheim’s collection, the very body of art that Frank Lloyd Wright designed the museum to house, aptly honoring the building’s 65th anniversary in fall 2024.