Collection: Orphism

Orphism, also called Orphic Cubism, is the colour focused offshoot of Cubism that emerged in Paris between 1912 and 1916. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the movement in 1912, drawing on the figure of Orpheus to suggest a painting that could function with the autonomy of music. Where Analytic Cubism had reduced colour almost entirely, Orphism kept the faceted geometric structure but reintroduced bright simultaneous contrasts grounded in the optical theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul.

The principal practitioners were Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), and František Kupka (1871–1957), with contributions from Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Robert Delaunay's Simultaneous Windows on the City (1912) and Circular Forms (1913) set the canonical examples. Kupka's Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colours (1912) was among the earliest fully abstract paintings shown publicly, exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. Sonia Delaunay extended the idiom to textile design and to the 1913 illustrated book La Prose du Transsibérien with Blaise Cendrars. The movement was first grouped at the Salon de la Section d'Or in October 1912 and dissolved by the outbreak of the First World War.