Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required.
I’m distinguishing a movement identified by an outside observer from one established by artists themselves not to delegitimize Pop, Minimalism, Arte Povera, or Abstract Expressionism, but to ask why artists at certain times chose to identify as part of a group, with shared purpose, written manifestos, informal gatherings, etc., and why they have been less likely to do so ever since. Perhaps conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century – advances in science and technology, the industrialization of the workplace, revolutionary discourse among anarchists and communists – made artists believe that what they did in their studios could change the world if they acted collectively. And perhaps now the dominance of the art market as a determinant of value, the economic compulsion to sort the few from the many, and social atomization tend to make artist-initiated art movements highly unlikely. From a 21st century perspective this impulse for artists to band together can seem naïve or irrelevant, which begs the question, how necessary is collectivity among visual artists, who mostly work alone?
Orphism, as it is presented in “Harmony and Dissonance, Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at the Guggenheim Museum, was not an artist-initiated movement like Surrealism, Futurism or Dada. At least one artist associated with the movement, František Kupka, ridiculed the term. We don’t associate most of the artists in the exhibition with Orphism to the degree that we associate Picasso with Cubism or Dali with Surrealism. There were also competing designations, such as Simultanism and Synchronism, which covered much of the same stylistic ground. Orphism has generally been viewed as a more poetic and colorful offshoot of analytical Cubism, which was identified with Picasso and Braque. For me, it works best as an umbrella term providing a lens through which to view abstract painting in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. These caveats aside, “Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” is a wonderful exhibition.
Orphism’s founder and chief advocate was the poet and art critic Apollinaire, who coined the term in 1912. (He is also credited with naming Cubism and Surrealism.) For Apollinaire, the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, who charmed savage beasts with his lyre, suggested a way forward from analytical Cubism, which was tied to mimesis and muted color. As Orphism’s foundational figures Apollinaire named a heterogenous group of artists working in Paris who had adopted a more poetic and more purely abstract approach: Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia. The organizers at the Guggenheim have cast a wide net that includes, in addition to these four, eastern Europeans Sonia Delaunay, Kupka, and Marc Chagall; Americans Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell; Albert Gleizes and Léopold Survage; artists new to me such as Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso of Portugal and Mainie Jellet of Ireland; and others who were living in Paris before the First World War.
The city had become an international incubator for all things new, strange, and exciting in the arts, and the show is a visual feast that transmits the energy artists must have felt in exploring territory so different from what had come before. Something was gained but something was also lost later on, when abstraction became an accepted alternative to representation and ceased to be a means of expressing specific ideas. Until the First World War upended politics and culture in 1914, artists were employing abstraction to explore theories of perception, color, and music, and spiritual beliefs emanating from religious systems like Theosophy (all those orbs and arcs). Abstraction loomed as an aesthetic counterpart to monumental advances in science and technology – the invention of electricity, the refinement of new modes of communication, and air travel – that made modern life both exciting and disorienting. They were not yet trying to represent the ineffable; that would come later with the encouragement of theorists like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. What dominates the Guggenheim show is the sense that a great deal is happening all at once – simultaneity, which Robert Delaunay and others considered the defining condition of modernity. He would have been shocked by how much more extreme in that regard life is now.
The exhibition should be of particular interest to painters, as it provides one of the clearest examinations I can remember of the evolution from representation to pure abstraction. Although the goal of untethering abstract painting from representation is no longer contested, the work at the Guggenheim shows how rich the terrain is when the two are intertwined. Now that semi-abstraction is re-emerging as an area of interest, this work feels both timeless and contemporary. And since so much current abstract painting pays homage to and comments on past art, many of the prototypes can be found in this show.
Picabia and Kupka stood out for me, as did a monumental grid painting by the English painter, David Bomberg. It’s fascinating to see Duchamp, now considered the source of so much conceptual art, represented by three lyrical paintings with enigmatic titles (a diagrammatic abstraction titled The Passage from Virgin to Bride). Sometimes Robert Delaunay seems encumbered by too many ideas. But not always. I loved First Disk, which anticipates the work of Kenneth Noland, Adolph Gottlieb and others. Sonia Delaunay’s cross-medium approach, particularly her collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars, conjures the freedom and radicalism of the time and challenges the division between high and low culture. Orphic rhythm pervades the exhibition, connecting painting to music and dance.
Something special really was happening in Paris: a convergence of dynamic forces pushing artists toward greater autonomy of form and color. If we’re going to call it Orphism, I’m fine with that. It came on the heels of an explosion of technological innovation and it’s not unreasonable to think that something similar could happen now, perhaps in response to artificial intelligence. It was interrupted, in 1914, by an international crisis fueled by nationalism run amok, in which twenty million people died. We should hope that we are not headed down that path again, and in the meanwhile, go see Orphism in Paris at the Guggenheim and be uplifted.
“Harmony and Dissonance, Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. Through March 9, 2025.
About the author: Adam Simon is a New York artist and writer. His most recent solo painting show was at OSMOS in 2024.
thanks for the great intro now I wanna see the show!
Excellent article, and I’m eager because of it to see the exhibition. Here are some thoughts that Adam provoked for me:
– Regarding “the dominance of the art market as a determinant of value”, It’s worth a deep dive on why this would be so. Competition instills a desire for distinction in order to maximize (the perception of) uniqueness and therefore, value? How exactly does the dominating influence of the art market atomize artists socially? I like to think that there’s an inverse relation between intrinsic and extrinsic value in art making, that the market value of art springs from things made without regard for it. Lesser the regard for monetization, more the value, ironically. Wishful thinking or a law of the universe? How did we lose sight of this?
– Theosophy’s orbs and arc, I’d like to know more about this.
– Representing the ineffable, Orphism to AbEx, an excellent characterization.
– Simultaneity = Modernity, and today’s extremity, worth exploring in depth.
***
Talking with Adam and friends a few weeks ago about the writing projects that they were then engaged in, I sensed a common thread about how ideas cohere in community. I had mentioned Becca Rothfeld’s post in Substack: “what the heck is a vibeshift?”, where she treats the idea of a vibe shift something like the phenomena of semantic satiation, where the constant repetition of a word often leads to an evaporation of meaning, in this case being a conceptual variety of it. Everyone is talking about vibes and vibe shifts and suddenly we find ourselves at a point where we don’t know what exactly what we are talking about anymore. Here are some thoughts springing from that conversation that may or may only be tangentially related to Adam’s article:
– The proliferating rapidity of art movement generation at different stages of art history is spun up by an enthusiasm, consumption and exhaustion, the rate of which seems the same no matter when they happen, not really affected by accelerating modernity (what happened in the 1910’s seems similar to post WWII & Vietnam years*), possessing a constant seemingly imparted by basic human character.
– *Does war quicken art movement formation? 🤮
– What qualifies the merit of an art movement, actually? Is it enough that a group of artists share inspired concerns and if so, how much deviation between their focus disqualifies the formation of a putative movement? Does such a concordance actually require a resonance echoed by critics and institutions? Is there a minimum degree of resonance? What’s the smallest molecule of art history?
– In connecting a collection of shared concerns across similar chained episodes in art history, is there a point when the links between dots can become too attenuated? Does the existence of sleeper art movements (arguably Duchamp, for example) disquiet our ability to know anything really substantial or make substantive claims with an air of finality when there might be others sleeping now in plain sight?
– Can institutions spike the ball? Can they over manipulate the perception of an art movement? Distortion? When are thumbs on scales?
– Is there a dynamic, something like an emergence property going on here?
– While Rothfeld’s piece was a toss off, her questioning “what is a vibe, actually” becomes something like semantic satiation where when we say a word over and over again, we lose its meaning. Could a similar thing be happening when we question what a vibe or vibe shift is, what an art movement is? A similar thing happens when we ask what art is, doesn’t it? It seems that with some ideas or concepts, once you go too deep, it’s (seemingly) impossible to surface again.
This is a rich and wonderful review of a visually stunning show. I agree that art movements are a thing of the past. Part of this is explained by the disappearance among artists of deeply held convictions about what art is and what it can and ought to do. Or put another way, few artists today believe in art the way the Delaunays did. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. “Everyone is on their own” is an ugly philosophy that’s been building for a long time and has now permeated all aspects of society, and artists aren’t immune from it.
P.S. Archipenko, who is said to have been influenced by Orphism, was represented in the show by a few small sculptures. IMHO they didn’t in the least convey anything transcendent.
Thank you all for these responses. Martin, I’m glad you will see the show. Laurie, I don’t think I agree that artists today are without deeply held convictions. I think that these convictions have been redirected in a way that makes them less part of a public conversation. This connects to some of Dennis’ questions (atomization?) which I will respond to soon, hopefully tomorrow.
Stark colory-ness!
Adam, I didn’t explain myself very well. I was thinking in terms of Irving Sandler’s idea (which I’ve never forgotten) that the demise of what he called “polemics”–i.e., the demise of artists and critics arguing passionately about aesthetic principles they hold dear–has ushered in an era marked by a kind of cultural enervation. This is true of art as well as politics, where currently we’re all tolerating a political coup that’s happening right in front of us. Of course, art is different from politics. With art, periods of cultural enervation always come and go, and often produce great art. I’m thinking of Roman Hellenism, for example. It was an imitative period that produced the brilliant Laocoön.
Responses to Dennis Hollingsworth:
– Regarding “the dominance of the art market as a determinant of value”,
This is a subject that most artists are probably all too aware of. The art market is structured as a pyramid. It requires a vast majority of underrepresented artists without much designated value at the bottom to support the inflated prices for the few at the top. Galleries are still the primary means of exposure for artists and since most galleries barely survive financially, they favor artists they can sell. In the past this market determination of value was countered by critical discourse identifying why certain art mattered. Not so much these days.
– Theosophy’s orbs and arc, I’d like to know more about this.
From Wikipedia:
According to Blavatsky, evolution occurs in descending and ascending arcs, from the first spiritual globe to the first mental globe, then from the first astral globe to the first physical globe, and then on from there.
– Simultaneity = Modernity, and today’s extremity, worth exploring in depth.
I’m sure that books have been written on this. Today’s version has been referred to as a distraction economy which connects to the difficulty of maintaining a single focus. Arguably this goes back to the early days of modernism and the sudden surfeit of sensory stimuli.
—Becca Rothfeld’s post in Substack: “what the heck is a vibeshift?”
Rothfeld is an interesting writer and I love that she references the novel ‘Mating’, a favorite of mine. Like her, I’m skeptical about the idea of vibeshifts, but the effect of technology on human behavior is huge.
– What qualifies the merit of an art movement, actually? Is it enough that a group of artists share inspired concerns and if so, how much deviation between their focus disqualifies the formation of a putative movement? Does such a concordance actually require a resonance echoed by critics and institutions? Is there a minimum degree of resonance? What’s the smallest molecule of art history?
I’m quoting this question in full because it makes me happy. It suggests that a group of artists (younger than me) could get together because, why not?
– Can institutions spike the ball? Can they over manipulate the perception of an art movement? Distortion? When are thumbs on scales?
I’m sure this is always the case. The state department’s, or some say CIA’s, promotion of Ab-Ex internationally, for example.
I figured that’s what you meant Laurie. It’s why I referred to public conversation in my response. I assume most artists think of themselves as having deeply held convictions because why do it otherwise.